Compact Surface Mount Tuning Component for Tunable Filter Applications

As the frequency spectrum gets more congested, chances of harmful interference become an issue.Enemies can intentionally jam or desensitize receivers in battle critical electronic warfare systems.A tunable band stop filter with wide tuning range is required to instantaneously adapt and reject such malicious interference.Nuvotronics will collaborate with UC Davis in this STTR to bring MEMS based tunable band stop filter to commercial and defense applications.UC Davis has extensive expertise in RF MEMS component design, fabrication, and measurement.Nuvotronics, through their propriety PolyStrata Technology, has demonstrated state-of-art performance in phase array antennas, true time delay networks, solid state power amplifiers, RF modules such as transceivers and radiometers and passive components such as filters/multiplexers, couplers, and combiners.We have demonstrated compact inter-digital filters with unloaded quality factor ranging 400 to 1000 from DC to 300GHz and demonstrated waveguide based filters with unloaded quality factor in 1000s.As part of a previous SBIR, Nuvotronics has also demonstrated a MEMS based tunable filter.The experience of UC Davis in RF MEMS work combined with Nuvotronics higher performance PolyStrata Technology, which is already in defense, space, and commercial applications, can lead to successful commercializing of tunable band stop filters.