Design Techniques for Passive Planar Reconfigurable RF Circuits: Reconfigurable RF Circuits

Reconfigurable systems play an important role in the design of reconfigurable wireless communication systems. In the traditional approach, separate transmit and receive pathways are required for every supported communication standard/frequency band for an RF front-end architecture. However, this approach increases the complexity and size of the system. This problem can be solved by employing subsystems, or blocks, that can function across multiple frequency bands and standards or that can reconfigure themselves based on the spectrum. This flexibility can free up finite spectrum resources to enable a miniaturized system. Therefore, microwave subsystems should ideally be reconfigurable and frequency agile in order to handle the vast frequency allocation of the regulated communication bands and the multitude of standards by which these radios must function. Such subsystems would allow for the implementation of new architectures with fewer functional components. Therefore, reconfigurable circuits can be useful for several wireless applications, such as telecommunication and military applications, where new frequency bands are coming or are expected to come. A flow graph for designing reconfigurable circuits is in Figure 1.