MEMS based microswitch and microrelay

Today in market miniature devices are gaining extreme popularity. The use of MEMS based devices is seeing a rapid growth and finds applications in wide range of commercial and defense applications. MEMS switches may be of thin metal cantilever, air bridge, diaphragm or some other structure which is electrically configured either in series or parallel with RF transmission line. These switches are designed to open the line or shunt it to ground upon actuation. These switches have showed excellent RF characteristics which include insertion loss values of 0.1dB, isolation values of -30dB when switches are in series configuration at low RF frequencies (VHF to ~10GHz) and in switches of shunt configuration at higher frequencies (~10 to 100GHz). This type of response enables excellent performance in traditional RF circuits, capacitor banks and routing in RF system. It can also be said that RF MEMS enables a new class of antenna system which can be electrically reconfigured. In all these applications traditional switches can be replaced by RFMEMS switches. In this work, we have designed cantilever based MEMS switches and relay which operates at different voltages and for different dimensions. The design, modeling and simulation are done by FEM technique which is inbuilt in COMSOL. The tool used for this modeling is Comsol/Multiphysics.