Mitigation of substrate coupling effects in RF switch by localized substrate removal using laser processing

In this paper, a 2-bit digital reflection-type phase shifter working at 120 GHz is presented. It uses a compact coupled-lines coupler with low insertion loss and high isolation over a wide bandwidth. The loads are made by a microstrip-line loaded by three PIN diodes whose states are tuned ON/OFF to obtain 90°, 180° and 270° phase shift relative to the reference (0°). Measurement results show RMS phase and amplitude error equal to 10.3° and 1.2 dB, respectively. The maximum insertion loss is equal to 8.6 dB, leading to a figure of merit of 31°/dB. As shown by simulation, by flipping PIN diodes and use negative voltage for biasing, the maximum insertion loss could be reduced to 3.6 dB (figure of merit of 75°/dB) along with a great improvement in RMS phase and amplitude errors, thus showing the potential of the proposed architecture.