PhD Defense of Victoria NASSERDDINE

This work focuses on the design of millimeter-wave phase shifters based on a new topology of tunable transmission lines named Tunable Slow wave CoPlanar Waveguide (TS-CPW). TS-CPW uses, on one side, the slow wave phenomenon in order to miniaturize longitudinally the transmission line and to show a better quality factor than its integrated microstrip transmission line counterpart and, on the other side, the MEMS approach to achieve tunability of the transmission line with a good figure-of-merit. First, the topology, the design and the electromagnetic simulations of the TS-CPW based on MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical system) are presented in a BiCMOS technology. Next, phase shifters with 3-bit of resolution based on TS-CPWs are developed at 60 GHz with two different values of total phase shift (157.5° and 315°). These TS-CPWs and phase shifters were fabricated in IHP’s 0.25 µm BiCMOS technology and measured on the vector network analyzers of IHP and IMEP-LaHC.