Micromechanical switches have demonstrated great potential at microwave and millimeterwave frequencies due to their very low intermodulation distortion, low power consumption, and low insertion loss characteristics. Comparing to traditional semiconductor switches, however, one of the most obstacle that hindered the application of MEMS switches is their high actuation voltage. To decrease its threshold voltage, the paper presents a novel MEMS switch. The switch is composed of a movable corrugated membrane, which can be pulled down onto the GaAs substrate at 12V. It has superior high-frequency performance with insertion loss of <0.25dB, and isolation better than 20dB at X-band frequency. Its structural design is mainly presented in this paper.

Date Published: 10 September 2002
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 4928, MEMS/MOEMS Technologies and Applications, (10 September 2002); doi: 10.1117/12.483188

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4928:
MEMS/MOEMS Technologies and Applications
Guofan Jin; John S. McKillop; Kazuhiro Hane, Editor(s)