A novel integrated solution for the control and diagnosis of electrostatic MEMS switches

The aim of this paper is to present a novel integrated solution for the control and diagnosis of electrostatic MEMS switches. A custom multi-channel integrated circuit (ASIC) has been designed and fabricated adopting a standard High-Voltage (HV) CMOS technology with a maximum operating voltage of 50V. Each channel is composed of a HV driver to actuate electrostatic switches and a diagnosis element to monitor the movement of the beam. This control circuit is particularly interesting for systems based on a large array of MEMS switches with a certain level of redundancy or fault tolerance, an active reflect array antenna in our case. The diagnosis principle has been modeled, simulated and an experimental campaign validates the principle with real actuators.