Design and development of miniaturized low voltage triangular RF MEMS switch for phased array application

Abstract

Nowadays, Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) is widely used for various applications ranging from switches to sensors. The central idea of this work is to design and analyze metal to metal contact based miniaturized low voltage triangular MEMS switch. The prioritized aim of this work is to develop the MEMS switch with improved characteristics such as low actuation voltage, high isolation, low insertion loss, low-stress factor, and good return loss. The MEMS switch is designed in a series configuration with coplanar waveguide (CPW) implementation. In this current design, the triangular beam based switch is developed and analysed with an electrode material of gold. The electromagnetic analysis of the current design was performed using Intellisuite, whereas the finite element method based mechanical analysis is performed on Ansoft HFSS. The software analysis revealed that the triangular switch showed an insertion loss of about 0.2 dB with 20 dB as a return loss, under the ON state, whereas under the OFF state, isolation is around 26 dB at Dc–20 GHz. Further, pull-in voltage of the current design is optimized to 5.6 V with the maximum induced stress of about 5 MPa.With all these improved characteristics, the current MEMS-based switch can be potentially used for real-time application with the calculated switching time of approximately 3.9 μs.