Frequency-reconfigurable mobile terminal antenna with MEMS switches

In this paper a frequency-reconfigurable mobile terminal antenna with a tuning range of one octave is presented. The antenna is based on a capacitive coupling element (CCE) and switching between two separate matching circuits controlled with RF MEMS switches. The tuning concept using MEMS is compared with similar tuning cases using HEMT switches. The MEMS tuning circuit outperforms the transistor switch based circuits in both efficiency and linearity, but it is shown that also the nonidealities of the MEMS components have to be considered when designing MEMS based circuits.