Phase measurement of microwave devices with amplitude independent ultra-fine resolution

A novel measurement technique to determine the phase shift of microwave devices is presented in this paper. The phase measurement is based on the superposition of phase shifted RF signals. Therefore it is fairly independent of the absolute magnitude of the microwave signal that is to be measured. The measurement setup is introduced and hardware improvements are shown. The accuracy of a reflection testset using the novel technique is demonstrated by measurements and compared to current VNA architectures using heterodyne detectors.