CRLH-based Low Insertion Loss Phase Shifter for Submillimeter-waves

This paper proposes an analog tunable phase shifter based on composite right/left-handed (CRLH) unit cells. The proposed phase shifter operates in the sub-millimeter band and exhibits a wide bandwidth together with a low insertion loss. The phase incursion of the input signal is obtained by changing the voltage of the varactor mounted on the fingers of the CRLH. The phase shifter layout has a compact size of 20 mm × 15 mm. Numerical simulation results demonstrate phase shifter achieves a phase range of 44.11-degrees, with a 10-degrees step, and an insertion loss 4.27 dB, when operating in the frequency range from 24 to 25.5 GHz. Our approach could be useful for developing beam-steering antenna arrays applied to the fifth-generation mobile network new radio (5G NR) systems.