A metamaterial-based passive MMIC tunable phase shifter

In this paper we present a fully integrated metamaterial-based phase shifter. This design replaces the printed TLs used to obtain the low-pass response with their lumped L-C equivalent circuit. This allows the integration of the phase shifter on single MMIC, and results in a large area saving. Furthermore, the proposed phase shifter achieves a low return loss across the entire tuning range although it does not use any active inductor circuits as in our previous designs. Hence this design is completely passive with no DC power consumption, and is expected to have better linearity and noise performance.