Today, the proposed flexible filtering solutions for radar or payload transmitters are not radical breakthrough but rather a gathering of incremental evolutions of products with heritage of various governmental and commercial programs. But, it is only the first step of a long term effort engaged to offer a versatile approach permitting to offer a wide panel of solutions to answer to various needs (from full flexible systems to dedicated units).

The existing solutions integrating mechanical, semiconductor or MEMS based tuning elements have too limited characteristics for very selective requirements, and do not provide high enough power handling. The tuning of filters cavities has very recently been proposed through mechanical actuators: the cavity volume or the dielectric resonator environment, then their resonant frequencies, are modified by the change of the morphology of a Liquid Metal Droplet magneto statically [24] , moveable membrane [25], motors [26] or other similar techniques. The more significant results have been obtained with the micro-motor actuation techniques, with a configuration mixing tunable high pass and low pass filters [23]. Even if able to tune the filter central frequency and bandwidth over a very wide range, this filter needs isolators, at least two motors and is not specifically adapted to multiplexing. XLIM and Thales work on a more compact solution specifically designed for tunable OMUX applications (patents pending [27][28]). This solution will be developed in the chair context.

In order to facilitate the emergence of new broadband applications, the operation of electronics equipment at higher frequency is in progress, in particular at millimetre wave frequencies. The flexibility in the choice of emergent transceiver architectures is dependent to the capability we will have to realize high Q tunable integrated filters. A basic research area has to be engaged for this aim.

PhD position open

Reconfigurable Multiplexer Concepts and Techniques for Space Applications