A wideband beam switching antenna using RF MEMS switches

Reconfigurable aperture antenna technology has been enabled by the advent of RF MEMS switches. Typical measured insertion losses of less than 0.25 dB up to 40 GHz with superb broadband isolation means that reconfiguration of the antenna for multi-band operation can now occur with a few MEMS switches rather than multiple PIN diode or FET switch circuits. In this paper, we describe a reflectarray antenna approach that can perform true time delay beam steering by using cascaded RF MEMS switches/coplanar strip transmission line sections. Measured RF MEMS switch characteristics in coplanar strip transmission lines are presented and the modeled reflected phase of five cascaded switch/transmission line sections is presented.