Design, fabrication and characterization of capacitive RF MEMS switches with low pull-in voltage

Author

Shekhar, S. ; Vinoy, K.J. ; Ananthasuresh, G.K.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Commun. Eng., Indian Inst. of Sci., Bangalore, India

fYear

2014

fDate

15-17 Dec. 2014

Firstpage

182

Lastpage

185

Abstract

The dielectric charging caused by high actuation voltages is one of the reasons behind the poor reliability of capacitive MEMS switches. This paper reports the design, fabrication and characterization of an RF MEMS switch with a very low-actuation voltage and high isolation. The device is fabricated on a glass substrate using a four mask surface micromachining process. The electromechanical characterization reveals a very low pull-in voltage of 4.8 V for the fabricated device. The RF measurement results show an insertion loss of 0.55 dB and an isolation of -47.6 dB at 40 GHz. The excellent RF performance makes these switches a suitable choice for very high frequency (K-band and above) applications.

Keywords

micromachining; microswitches; microwave switches; capacitive RF MEMS switch; dielectric charging; glass substrate; high actuation voltage; low pull-in voltage MEMS switch; low-actuation voltage; mask surface micromachining process; voltage 4.8 V; Dielectrics; Fabrication; Loss measurement; Micromechanical devices; Microswitches; Radio frequency; Semiconductor device measurement; Capacitive switch; RF MEMS; insertion loss; isolation; pull-in voltage;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Microwave and RF Conference (IMaRC), 2014 IEEE International

Conference_Location

Bangalore

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IMaRC.2014.7038983

Filename

7038983