Maneuvering actuation voltage of a electrostatic MEMS switch with a new coplanar pre-charged electrode

This paper reports an innovative method for maneuvering the pull-in voltage by adopting the coplanar pre-charged electrode to the conventional MEMS switch. In the simulated results (CoventorWare^¿), the initial pull-in voltage of 55 V was reduced to 5 V with a little change of the pull-in height. The proposed MEMS switch was properly fabricated with the surface micromachining. The fabricated switch showed an initial pull-in voltage of 97.4 V (No pre-charged) and isolation of -47 dB at 2 GHz. However, when the switch was pre-charged by 100 V, the pull-in voltage was dramatically reduced to 8.8 V and the isolation was -46.6 dB at 2 GHz showing an acceptable degradation (0.4dB).