Development of a novel bidirectional electrothermal actuator and its application to RF MEMS switch

Author

Yan-qing Zhu ; Lei Han ; Ming Qin ; Qing-An Huang ; Ming-xia Jiang

Author_Institution

Key Lab. of MEMS of Minist. of Educ., Southeast Univ., Nanjing, China

fYear

2014

fDate

13-16 April 2014

Firstpage

180

Lastpage

185

Abstract

This paper presents the design and testing results of an electrothermally driven MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) actuator. Different from conventional uni-directional thermal actuators, this in-plane bi-directional electrothermal actuator is capable of producing displacements in two directions as a single device. The RF MEMS switch driven by this cascaded electrothermal actuator is also proposed. Due to this bidirectional actuator, the proposed switch can not only realize the OFF-state to ON-state shifting but also provide an additional deep OFF-state. At the deep OFF state, the isolation better than -30 dB can be achieved at the whole frequency range of 0 ~ 40 GHz.

Keywords

microactuators; microswitches; RF MEMS switch; cascaded electrothermal actuator; deep OFF state; electrothermally driven MEMS; in-plane bidirectional electrothermal actuator; microelectromechanical systems actuator; Actuators; Capacitance; Contacts; Force; Microswitches; Radio frequency; RF MEMS switch; bidirectional; electrothermal actuator; low voltage;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Nano/Micro Engineered and Molecular Systems (NEMS), 2014 9th IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Waikiki Beach, HI

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/NEMS.2014.6908786

Filename

6908786