Agile Materials & Technologies Inc. announced its PSCPS family of coplanar analog phase shifters. These products are the first in a series that enable commercial and military RF communications manufacturers to significantly decrease the number of components required for multi-mode systems, reducing device size, power consumption, complexity and cost.

Agile's new phase shifters are manufactured using the company's proprietary advanced thin film ferroelectric technology. Using Barium Strontium Titanate (BST), a ferroelectric material with a tunable dielectric constant, Agile has developed a series of BST-based capacitors which, when integrated with other passive components, facilitate the design of high performance phase shifting devices in compact form and at low cost.

Traditionally, phase shifters in phased array antennas account for nearly 50 percent of the total cost of the antenna array. Using Agile's innovative phase shifter technology, manufacturers can create high performance power-efficient parts for nearly half the cost incurred using conventional devices, the company says.

Agile's PSCPS family of phase shifters requires only a single analog tuning voltage per device, reducing signal routing complexity and allowing precise, continuous phase shift control.

The proprietary thin film BST technology utilized by Agile requires a maximum control voltage of 20 V, and because the phase shifters utilize only passive components, the control voltage draws nominally zero current, enabling the phase shifters to consume zero power.

The phase shifters achieve greater than 360 degrees of phase shift with 6 dB to 7 dB or less typical insertion loss at zero phase shift, improving to 4 dB to 5 dB with increasing phase shift.

The PSCPS products can handle RF power levels in excess of 20 dBm (100 mW). In addition, their distributed design yields highly uniform group delay effectively enabling wide instantaneous bandwidths.

Agile's phase shifters are available in frequencies ranging from below L-band through Ka-band (less than 1 GHz to over 40 GHz) for use in phased array antennas and base station amplifier linearization.

With no active device components, these phase shifters do not require hermetic or other special packaging, enabling designers to reduce manufacturing costs and conserve board space. The devices occupy a minuscule 3 mm² to 6 mm² of board space, depending upon frequency. Flip-chip board mounting techniques can be effectively utilized, as well, as conventional wire bond approaches.
Agile Materials & Technologies Inc.
www.agilematerials.com

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