Broadband tunable phase shifter for microwaves

Abstract

We implement a broadly tunable phase shifter for microwaves based on superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) and study it both experimentally and theoretically. At different frequencies, a unit transmission coefficient, |S21| = 1, can be theoretically achieved along a curve where the phase shift is controllable by the magnetic flux. The fabricated device consists of three equidistant SQUIDs interrupting a transmission line. We model each SQUID embedded at different positions along the transmission line with two parameters, capacitance and inductance, the values of which we extract from the experiments. In our experiments, the tunability of the phase shift varies from 0.07 × π to 0.14 × π radians along the full-transmission curve with the input frequency ranging from 6.00 GHz to 6.28 GHz. The reported measurements are in good agreement with simulations, which is promising for future design work of phase shifters for different applications.