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Phase shifters are common microwave circuit devices, which are widely used in telecommunication and radar applications, microwave measurement systems, and many other industrial applications. They are key circuits of T/R modules and are used to form the main beam of the electronically scanned phase array antennas. Wideband operating range is an important criterion for EW applications. Hence, wideband performance of the phase shifter is also important. In this study, four wideband phase shifter circuits are designed, fabricated and measured for 6-18 GHz frequency range. Phase shifters are separately designed in order to get 11.25, 22.5, 45 and 90&ordm / phase shifts with minimum phase error and low return losses. Phase shifter circuits are designed and fabricated in microstrip structure onto two different substrates as Rogers TMM10i and Alumina using printed circuit board and thin film production techniques, respectively. Also phase shifter circuits that include microstrip spiral inductors for DC biasing are designed and fabricated using thin film production technique. For each design the fabricated circuits are measured and results are compared with simulation results in the content of this thesis. Circuit designs and EM simulations are performed by using ADS2008&reg / , Sonnet&reg / , and CST&reg / .

In this thesis, RF sections of a multi tier instantaneous frequency measurement (IFM) receiver which can operate in 2 &ndash / 18 GHz frequency band is designed, simulated and partially realized. The designed structure uses one coarse tier, three medium tiers and one fine tier for frequency discrimination. A novel reflective phase shifting technique is developed which enables the design of very wideband phase shifters using stepped cascaded transmission lines. Compared to the classical phase shifters using coupled transmission lines, the new approach came out to be much easier to design and fabricate with much better responses. This phase shifting technique is used in coarse and medium tiers. In fine frequency measurement tier, I/Q discriminator approach is used because reflective phase shifters would necessitate unacceptably long delay lines. Two I/Q discriminators are designed and fabricated using Lange directional couplers that operate in 2-6 GHz and 6-18 GHz, resulting in satisfactory response. Additionally, 6 GHz HP and 6 GHz LP distributed filters are designed and fabricated to be used for these I/Q discriminators in fine tier. In order to eliminate possible ambiguities in coarse tier, a distributed element LP-HP diplexer with 10 GHz crossover frequency is designed and fabricated successfully to be used for splitting the frequency spectrum into 2-10 GHz and 10-18 GHz to ease the design and realization problems. Three power dividers operating in the ranges 2-18 GHz, 2-6 GHz and 6-18 GHz are designed for splitting incoming signals into different branches. All of these dividers are also fabricated with satisfactory response. The fabricated components are all compact and highly reproducible. The designed IFM can tolerate 48 degrees phase margin for resolving ambiguity in the tiers while special precautions are taken in fine tier to help ambiguity resolving process also. The resulting IFM provides a frequency resolution below 1 MHz in case of using an 8-bit sampler with a frequency accuracy of 0.28 MHz rms for 0 dB input SNR and 20 MHz video bandwidth.

Digital RF phase shifters fabricated using additive manufacturing processes are presented and studied. The purpose is to explain the performance differences between phase shifters fabricated using additive manufacturing and those fabricated with conventional subtractive techniques. All phase shifters are designed to operate at a center frequency of 2.45 GHz with a 100 MHz bandwidth. The 1-bit 45° switched line phase shifters have an average insertion loss of 1.3 dB and a 220 mm2 footprint, while the 1-bit 180° high-pass low-pass phase shifters have an insertion loss 1.56 dB and a 180 mm2 footprint. The 4-bit high-pass low-pass, switched line hybrid phase shifters on the other hand show an average state insertion loss of 5.4 dB and have a 660 mm2 foot print. By carefully analyzing the performance of the various phase shifter designs it is shown that the limiting factors of additive manufacturing technology are the low conductivity of CB028 silver ink in comparison to copper, and the inability to print dielectrics with low surface roughness. Finally, parallel plate capacitors and a spiral inductor designed to be fabricated using additive manufacturing techniques are studied. This is done in order to better understand the advantages and disadvantages of such a design. By analyzing the component’s simulated performance it is shown that 3D printed capacitors and inductors are feasible as long as the capacitance or inductance values needed are low. Large value 3D printed components are impractical for RF applications due to their large size.

Owing to the large electric-field-dependent permittivity, ferroelectric thin films have attracted a great deal of attention on applications in miniature tunable microwave components with high performance and cost reduction, such as phase shifters, tunable oscillators, delay lines, and antennas. These tunable devices require large change in the dielectric constant with applied field and a low loss at microwave frequencies. As one of the promising ferroelectric materials, barium strontium titanate thin film, especially Ba0.5Sr0.5TiO3 (BST) films, have raises great research interests due to its high dielectric constant, which is tunable in an external electric field, combined with relative low loss at microwave frequencies. Tunable microwave components, such as phase shifter, based on the BST films have been widely investigated. Since the polarization, the significant characterization of ferroelectrics, is very sensitive to distortion in crystal structure of ferroelectrics, strain can be effectively utilized to tailor the dielectric properties of BST films. Due to the lattice-mismatch from the substrate and various deposition conditions, epitaxial BST thin film usually contains residual strain generated during film growth. Strain control by improved deposition technique and implementing thermal treatment as well as choosing suitable substrate has attracted intensive attentions in ferroelectric film fabrication. Theory predicts that high dielectric properties can be achieved when free strain or slightly tensile strain left in the BST thin film at room temperature. Microwave application, such as phase shifter, also expects the enhanced tunability by an applied electric field. In this dissertation, single crystalline BST thin films deposited by radio frequency magnetron sputtering on SrTiO3 and DyScO3 substrates were studied. The crystal structure characteristics, including lattice parameters and film strain, were determined using X-ray diffraction. A new growth technique, three-step technique, was introduced and implemented into BST thin film deposition. The application of this new technique in deposition dramatically reduced the compressive strain in the films. We use microwave measurements on coplanar waveguides to evidence the improvement on dielectric properties achieved by tailoring the film strain. Additionally, we studied the BST film deposited by pulsed laser deposition (PLD) with introducing a sputtered seed layer of BST thin film. Compared with the BST film directly deposited on the substrate by PLD deposition, the films with a seed layer showed a large enhancement on the dielectric constant and tunability. The discussion on the change in film strain and dielectric performance of the PLD deposited films further proved the influence of film strain on dielectric properties. We discussed the design, fabrication, and measurement of coplanar waveguide transmission lines as phase shifters fabricated BST films. The thin BST films (~700 nm) on DyScO3 substrates deposited by sputtering demonstrated that the three-step deposition technique improved differential phase shift and microwave figure of merit to a great extent. The introduction of the sputtered seed layer into the PLD deposition of a thicker BST film (~2.15 μm) showed a dramatically enhancement on differential phase shift and microwave figure of merit. The enhanced performance on different series of BST films in microwave frequencies is consistent with the improvement on crystal structure, especially with the change in film strain.

Engineers know well from an early point in their training the trials and tribulations of having to make design tradeoffs in order to optimize one performance parameter for another. Discovering tradeoff conditions that result in the elimination of a loss associated with the enhancement of some other parameter (an improvement over a typical tradeoff), therefore, ushers in a new paradigm of design in which the constraints which are typical of the task at hand are alleviated. We call such a design paradigm “tuning” as opposed to “trading off”, and this is the central theme of this work. We investigate two types of microwave electronic devices, namely GaN-based heterostructure field effect transistors (HFETs) and tunable ferroelectric-ferrite-based microwave phase shifters. The “tuning” associated with these types of devices arises from the notion of an optimal 2DEG density, capable of achieving higher performance in terms of electron velocity and enhanced reliability in the case of the HFET, and the coupling of ferroelectric and ferrite materials in tunable microwave phase shifters, capable of achieving high differential phase shifts while at the same time mitigating the losses associated with impedance mismatching which typically arise when the phase is tuned. Promises and problems associated with HFET devices based on the intriguing InAlN/GaN material system will be described. We focus on the fundamental problem associated with the induction of the large density of carriers at the interface, namely the disintegration of an excess of longitudinal optical phonons (hot phonons) in the channel. We use microwave measurements in conjunction with stress tests to evidence the existence of an optimal 2DEG density wherein the hot phonon effect can be “tuned,” which allows for enhanced high frequency performance as well as device reliability. Next, we focus on the design, fabrication, and measurement of tunable phase shifters consisting of thin films of BaxSr1-xTiO3 (BST), which has the advantage of having high dielectric tunability as well as relatively low microwave loss. We discuss the design, fabrication, and measurement of a simple coplanar waveguide (CPW) type of phase shifter as well as a more complicated “hybrid” phase shifter consisting of a ferrite (YIG) in addition to BST. The use of such a bilayer allows one to “tune” the impedance of the phase shifters independently of the phase velocity through careful selection of the DC biasing magnetic fields, or alternatively through the use of an additional piezoelectric layer, bonded to YIG whose permeability can then be tuned through magnetostriction.

Este trabalho, realizado junto ao Grupo de Novos Materiais e Dispositivos (GNMD) pertencente ao Laboratório de Microeletrônica (LME) da Universidade de São Paulo, teve como objetivo correlacionar algumas propriedades físico-químicas de filmes finos de Ba1-XSrxTiO3 (BST), obtidos pela técnica de pulverização catódica reativa (sputtering), com os parâmetros de deposição, visando a fabricação de defasadores inteligentes operando em 60 GHz. Propriedades como cristalinidade e composição química foram estudadas e relacionadas com o tipo de substrato sobre o qual os filmes finos de BST foram depositados, e com os diversos parâmetros de deposição variados. Foi observada uma forte influência dos parâmetros de deposição, principalmente da temperatura e do tipo de substrato, na cristalinidade dos filmes. Os filmes depositados sobre cobre são mais cristalinos do que aqueles depositados sobre Si. Já a composição química dos filmes não variou significativamente, mantendo-se próxima à do alvo de sputtering utilizado, independentemente do substrato ou das condições de deposição. As propriedades elétricas dos filmes fabricados foram extraídas de capacitores de placas paralelas construídos utilizando o BST como dielétrico linear. As curvas de capacitância vs tensão a 1 MHz destes capacitores permitiram determinar uma variação de tunabilidade de até 44 %, para uma permissividade elétrica relativa de 310, valores estes compatíveis com aqueles encontrados na literatura. As propriedades elétricas dos filmes produzidos permitiram projetar um defasador de 1,3 mm2, com uma figura de mérito de 30º/dB para uma defasagem de 360º. / This work, performed at the New Materials and Devices Group (GNMD) of the Microelectronics Laboratory of the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo, has the objective to correlate reactive sputtered-BST thin films to its deposition parameters, aiming to produce a 60 GHz tunable phase shifter. Thin film crystallinity and stoichiometry were correlated with sputtering deposition parameters and the type of substrate. A strong influence of the sputtering parameters was observed on BST crystallinity, mainly the temperature and the type of substrate. Thin films on copper are more crystalline than on Si (100). The stoichiometry, on the other hand, did not change as function of the deposition parameters or the substrate in both cases. The thin films electrical properties were obtained by capacitance vs voltage measurements, with the BST as linear dielectric of a parallel plate capacitor. The capacitors 1 MHz C-V characterization showed tunabilities as high as 44%, for an electrical permittivity of 310. These properties allowed a phase shifter project, resulting a 1,3 mm2 device with a figure of merit of 30 º/dB for 360 º phase shift.

Este trabalho, realizado junto ao Grupo de Novos Materiais e Dispositivos (GNMD) pertencente ao Laboratório de Microeletrônica (LME) da Universidade de São Paulo, teve como objetivo correlacionar algumas propriedades físico-químicas de filmes finos de Ba1-XSrxTiO3 (BST), obtidos pela técnica de pulverização catódica reativa (sputtering), com os parâmetros de deposição, visando a fabricação de defasadores inteligentes operando em 60 GHz. Propriedades como cristalinidade e composição química foram estudadas e relacionadas com o tipo de substrato sobre o qual os filmes finos de BST foram depositados, e com os diversos parâmetros de deposição variados. Foi observada uma forte influência dos parâmetros de deposição, principalmente da temperatura e do tipo de substrato, na cristalinidade dos filmes. Os filmes depositados sobre cobre são mais cristalinos do que aqueles depositados sobre Si. Já a composição química dos filmes não variou significativamente, mantendo-se próxima à do alvo de sputtering utilizado, independentemente do substrato ou das condições de deposição. As propriedades elétricas dos filmes fabricados foram extraídas de capacitores de placas paralelas construídos utilizando o BST como dielétrico linear. As curvas de capacitância vs tensão a 1 MHz destes capacitores permitiram determinar uma variação de tunabilidade de até 44 %, para uma permissividade elétrica relativa de 310, valores estes compatíveis com aqueles encontrados na literatura. As propriedades elétricas dos filmes produzidos permitiram projetar um defasador de 1,3 mm2, com uma figura de mérito de 30º/dB para uma defasagem de 360º. / This work, performed at the New Materials and Devices Group (GNMD) of the Microelectronics Laboratory of the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo, has the objective to correlate reactive sputtered-BST thin films to its deposition parameters, aiming to produce a 60 GHz tunable phase shifter. Thin film crystallinity and stoichiometry were correlated with sputtering deposition parameters and the type of substrate. A strong influence of the sputtering parameters was observed on BST crystallinity, mainly the temperature and the type of substrate. Thin films on copper are more crystalline than on Si (100). The stoichiometry, on the other hand, did not change as function of the deposition parameters or the substrate in both cases. The thin films electrical properties were obtained by capacitance vs voltage measurements, with the BST as linear dielectric of a parallel plate capacitor. The capacitors 1 MHz C-V characterization showed tunabilities as high as 44%, for an electrical permittivity of 310. These properties allowed a phase shifter project, resulting a 1,3 mm2 device with a figure of merit of 30 º/dB for 360 º phase shift.