Highly Miniaturized Continuously Tunable Phase Shifter Based on Liquid Crystal and Defected Ground Structures

This letter presents a highly miniaturized continuously tunable microstrip line phase shifter from 10 to 67 GHz. The design takes the advantage of the microstrip line topology by a ground plane with defected ground structures (DGSs). This leads to slow wave (SW) effect of the transmission line (TL), thus the TL can be physically compact, while maintaining its electric length. By applying tunable microwave liquid crystal (LC) with an anisotropic permittivity as dielectric, a delay line phase shifter is realized. The proposed microstrip LC phase shifter with DGS and a standard microstrip LC phase shifter as reference are both filled with 20-mm-thick high-performance LC GT3-23001. By comparison, the one with DGS exhibits a significant SW effect and an improved LC tuning efficiency which leads to a remarkable enhancement of figure of merit (FoM) and compactness than the reference. A second microstrip LC phase shifter utilizing DGS filled with 5-mm thick more advanced GT7-29001 LC shows outstanding FoM of 55°/dB, compactness of
$201^{\circ }/{\lambda }_{0}$
, and response time of 210 ms.