Piezoelectric reliable RF-MEMS switch with narrow contact-gap using wafer-bond packaging

Author

Nakatani, Takeshi ; Katsuki, Takayuki ; Okuda, Haruhisa ; Toyoda, O. ; Ueda, Shuichi ; Nakazawa, Fumihiko

Author_Institution

Assoc. of Super-Adv. Electron. Technol., Akashi, Japan

fYear

2013

fDate

2-7 June 2013

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

3

Abstract

This paper presents a low-cost packaged and reliable piezoelectric-actuated RF-MEMS switch for mobile communications. We fabricated a stiff single crystal silicon (SCS) beam that has an actuator and a contact bump on an SOI wafer without backside etching. We bonded the wafer to a ceramic cap wafer, directly packaging a switch with a contact gap of 0.5-μm not using sacrificial layers. The switch operated up to 1 billion cycles keeping a low insertion loss (<;0.4 dB up to 5GHz) at 20-V driving voltage. The surface mountable SPST switch was 1.6 × 1.1 × 0.8 mm in size.

Keywords

microswitches; mobile communication; piezoelectric actuators; semiconductor device reliability; silicon-on-insulator; wafer bonding; wafer level packaging; SOI wafer; actuator; backside etching; ceramic cap wafer; contact bump; mobile communications; narrow contact gap; piezoelectric reliable RF MEMS switch; sacrificial layers; stiff single crystal silicon beam; voltage 20 V; wafer bond packaging; Contacts; Electrodes; Insertion loss; Packaging; Radio frequency; Reliability; Switches; Air gaps; mobile communication; piezoelectric actuators; radiofrequency microelectormechanical systems; reliability; switches; wafer bonding;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Microwave Symposium Digest (IMS), 2013 IEEE MTT-S International

Conference_Location

Seattle, WA

ISSN

0149-645X

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-6177-4

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/MWSYM.2013.6697667

Filename

6697667