X-Band Reconfigurable Phase Shifters Based on SIW and Liquid Metal Technologies

This paper presents three reconfigurable phase shifters operate at X-band and designed utilizing liquid metal (LM). The phase shifters operate at 10 GHz and they have very low insertion loss performance and able to handle high levels of radio frequency (RF) power. Besides, the proposed phase shifters able to achieve a total of 360 <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">^∘</tex> phase shift and they are compact in size as they are designed using substrate integrated waveguides (SIW). This enable the proposed phase shifters to be integrated within SIW based feeding structures to realize complete phased array antenna systems. The phase shift is realized by inserting a series of liquid metal vias in the SIW. When a single or multiple via connection is needed, the via hole is filled with liquid metal and conversely, the liquid metal is withdrawn from the via when the connection is no longer required.