Impact of Mechanical Vibration on the Performance of RF MEMS Evanescent-Mode Tunable Resonators

This letter presents the first experimental investigation on the impact of mechanical vibration on the performance of MEMS evanescent-mode tunable resonators. It is shown both conceptually and experimentally that mechanical vibration can introduce distortions to the RF signal. Signal distortions are found to be very small (<; -40 dBc of sideband or <; 0.5% change in-error vector magnitude) for a diaphragm based MEMS tunable resonator with a diaphragm size of 7 × 7 mm² and mechanical vibration amplitude of 1g. A novel MEMS tunable evanescent-mode resonator based on two arrays of cantilever beams that replace the diaphragm is also presented to achieve even lower distortion in the presence of mechanical vibration. A 15-25 dB reduction in the vibration-induced sideband is observed.