Electrothermal actuation of vanadium dioxide for tunable capacitors and microwave filters with integrated microheaters

We report the fabrication, modeling and characterization of novel microwave tunable capacitors based on the metal-insulator transition (MIT) of Vanadium Dioxide (VO2) as a future replacement solution for microelectromechanical capacitive switches. We present the advantages of VO2-based capacitors over alternative technologies for microwave reconfigurable electronics in terms of ease of integration, design and performance at high frequency. We show the potential of the proposed devices for RF reconfigurable electronics by fabricating a tunable bandstop filter (22.5-19.8 GHz) with insertion loss