2014 IEEE International Microwave and RF Conference (IMaRC)

Design, Fabrication and Characterization of Capacitive RF MEMS

Switches with Low Pull-In Voltage

S. Shekhar1, K. J. Vinoy1, and G. K. Ananthasuresh2

1
Dept of Electrical and Communication Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India
2
Dept of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India

Abstract The dielectric charging caused by high actuation very high actuation voltage of around 20-40 V. Such a high
voltages is one of the reasons behind the poor reliability of voltage generates very high electric field of 2-4 MV/cm in the
capacitive MEMS switches. This paper reports the design,
fabrication and characterization of an RF MEMS switch with a thin dielectric layer. Under such a high electric field, charges
very low-actuation voltage and high isolation. The device is tunnel into the dielectric under a phenomenon similar to
fabricated on a glass substrate using a four mask surface Frankel - Poole emissions [11] and once the charge tunnels
micromachining process. The electromechanical characterization into the dielectric, they get trapped and the recombination time
reveals a very low pull-in voltage of 4.8 V for the fabricated for these trapped charges can be very long, in the order of
device. The RF measurement results show an insertion loss of
0.55 dB and an isolation of -47.6 dB at 40 GHz. The excellent RF seconds to days. Thus, we see that high actuation voltage
performance makes these switches a suitable choice for very high causes high rate of dielectric charging and thus affecting the
frequency (K-band and above) applications. life-time of a switch. The comparison based on the low
actuation and RF performance with the state-of-the-art of the
Index Terms RF MEMS, Capacitive switch, pull-in voltage, technology is presented in Table II.
isolation, insertion loss. To overcome this issue, we report the design, fabrication
and characterization of an RF MEMS switch with a very pull-
I. INTRODUCTION in voltage. This paper is organized as follows. In Section II,
the proposed switch design along with various other
The very first demonstrationof a microelectromechanical geometries and their pull-in simulation results are presented.
switch in 1979 [1] and the advances in micro-fabrication Section III consists of the fabrication process and reports the
processes in the past few decades have made radio frequency mechanical and DC characterization results. The results and
microelectromechanical systems (RF MEMS) an attractive discussion are presented in section IV.
area of research. The reason behind the popularity of RF
MEMS switches is their superior RF performance such as very
low insertion loss, high isolation, near-zero power Reference
consumption and good linearity [2], at microwave frequencies,
plane
compared to semiconductor switches (PIN, FETs switches).
RF MEMS switches can be metal-to-metal contact or A A'
capacitive in series or shunt configurations. Capacitive MEMS
switches are preferred over the DC-contact switches as the
latter are limited to low frequency (< 10 GHz) applications
whereas capacitive switches provide very low insertion loss
and high isolation at very high frequencies (>10 GHz) [2].
However, capacitive RF MEMS switches have not been
able to qualify the commercial standards because of their poor A A'
reliability [3]. Several failure mechanisms have been reported
[4]. Among these, the dielectric charging is a major concern.
An RF MEMS capacitive switch uses a thin dielectric layer
between the top movable membrane and the bottom electrode
to avoid the direct contact as well as to perform the switching
action through capacitive coupling. To increase the figure-of-
merit (FoM) of a capacitive switch (defined as the ratio of
capacitances in up and down-states (Cdown /Cup), the dielectric
layer is often made very thin in the range of 1500 to 2000 Fig. 1.Top view and cross section of the low actuation voltage
. Most of the switches reported in the past [5] - [10], need a capacitive RF MEMS switch.

182 978-1-4799-6317-1/14/$31.00 2014 IEEE

 II. DESIGN AND ELECTROMECHANICAL SIMULATIONS III. FABRICATION AND ELECTROMECHANICAL
CHARACTERIZATION
Fig. 1 shows the top view and cross section of the switch.
The switch consists of a beam with four L-shaped supports, A. Fabrication Process
suspended over a 50  coplanar waveguide (CPW)
The switch is fabricated on a glass substrate using a four-
transmission line. The signal line is also used as a bottom
mask surface micromachining process [12]. The complete
electrode. The minimum potential required to actuate the
fabrication process flow and SEM micro graphs are depicted
switch is the pull-in voltage, Vpi, which is given by
in Figs. 3 and 4. CPW lines are fabricated on the glass by
sputtering Cr/Au/Cr (1 nm/100nm/10 nm). A 1500 thick
8kg 03 Si3N4 using PECVD is then deposited over the CPW and
Vpi (1) patterned to form the dielectric layer between the beam and
27H 0 A the signal line.
The preceding equation shows the dependency of an
actuation voltage on various parameters such as stiffness (k),
the air-gap (g0), and the overlapping area (A) between the
electrodes of the switch. Therefore, in order to get a very low
actuation voltage, the switch should have a low spring
constant, k, and low air-gap. The proposed switch design has a
beam with four L-shaped supports, whose performance is
compared with two other beam support designs - (1) normal
fixed -fixed and (2) parallel-supports. All the designs are
simulated in CoventorWare, which is an finite element method
(FEM) based MEMS simulator. The simulation result of the
proposed design shows a lower pull-in voltage of 4.5 V
compared to 8.5 V for design 1 and 6.3 V for design 2 as
shown in Fig. 2. These simulation results show that the 
proposed design is a good choice for a low-actuation voltage
Fig. 3.Fabrication process flow of a capacitive RF MEMS switch.
switch.

Design 1 Design 2

Proposed Design
10 um (holes)
100 um (width)
0.5 um (membrane)

2 um (air-gap)


Fig. 4. SEM images and cross section views of thedifferent parts of

Fig. 2. Electromechanical pull-in simulation results of various switch
the fabricated switch.
geometries.

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 Positive photo resist (PPR) S1813 is used as the sacrificial electromechanical results are presented in Table I. These
layer. The sacrificial layer provides the required gap between results are found to be in close agreement.
the switch element and the signal line beneath it. A 2 m-thick
PPR is spin-coated and patterned later to provide sufficient x 10
-13

gap. In the final stage, the structural layer of 0.5m thick Au

is sputtered and patterned. Holes of 10 m in diameter are 7
formed in the switch to facilitate easy etching of the sacrificial
6

Capacitance [F]
layer during the release. These holes not only help in the
release process but also improves the dynamic performance of 5
the switch by reducing the squeeze-film damping effect and
4 Pull-in Vol.
hence the switching time.
3 = 4.8V
B. Mechanical Characterization
2
Mechanical characterization is performed on the fabricated 1
switches using Laser Doppler Vibrometer (LDV) to extract the 0 2 4 6 8 10
mechanical resonant frequency and the Q-factor of the switch. Actuation voltage [V]
An LDV uses Dopplers shift effect to measure the
displacement as well as velocity of the switch. The frequency Fig. 6. The C-V plot as the voltage is increased in the upward
response of the switch due to 2 V DC and 0.8 V AC is shown direction from 0-to-10V showing the pull-in characteristic of the
in Fig. 5. The extracted resonant frequency, f0, from this switch.
response is found to be 9.38 kHz which is in reasonable
Table I
agreement with the FEM simulated result of 8.29 kHz as the
first natural frequency. Thus, there is about 13% discrepancy SIMULATED AND EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS OF THE PROPOSED
between the experimental and computed natural frequency. RF MEMS SWITCH
The reason behind this discrepancy could be explained as the Simulated Measured
extra stress developed post-fabrication. The Q-factor of the
switch is found to be 1.2 which also satisfies the Pull-in voltage, Vpi (V) 4.5 4.8
recommended Q-factor for the best release response (Q  1) Mechanical resonant 8.29 9.38
[2]. frequency, f0 (kHz)

B. RF Characterization
An Agilent E8361A Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) with
200 m pitch coplanar probes is used to extract S-parameters
to quantify the RF performance of the fabricated MEMS
switches. The measurement results are shown in Fig. 7.

0 0
Insertion Loss, S21 [dB]
Return Loss, S11 [dB]

Resonant freq. = 9.38 kHz

Q-factor = 1.2 -10 -2

-20 -4

 -30 -6

-40 -8
0 20 40 60 0 20 40 60
Fig. 5. Mechanical resonant frequency response using LDV. Frequency [GHz] Frequency [GHz]

0 0
Return Loss, S11 [dB]

Isolation, S21 [dB]

IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION -10

-20
A. DC Characterization -20
-40
An Agilent 4248A semiconductor parametric analyzer is -30

used to measure the pull-in voltage of the switch. The C-V -40 -60
0 20 40 60 0 20 40 60
measurement result of the fabricated switch is shown Fig. 6. Frequency [GHz] Frequency [GHz]
Also, a comparison of the simulated and measured
Fig. 7. Measured S-parameters in UP and DOWN-state positions.

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 TABLE II
COMPARISON OF THE PERFORMANCE OF THE CAPACITIVE RF MEMS SWITCH AT 40 GHZ WITH STATE OF THE ART DEVICES.

References
Parameters
[5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] This work
Metal bridge 0.3m (Al) ----- 1.0 m (Au) 0.35/7.5m 1.5m (Au) ----- 0.5 m (Au)
Ti-Au/Au
Air gap 2.2 m 3 m 1.3 m 0.3 m 3.0 m ----- 2.0 m
Dielectric 0.28m (SiO2) ----- 0.10m No 0.35 m SiO2 0.15 m
(Si3N4) Dielectric (Ta2O5) (Si3N4)
Insertion loss 0.1 dB 0.1 dB 0.25 dB 1.5 dB 0.8 dB 1.41 dB 0.55 dB
(UP - state)
Isolation 35 dB 20 dB 42 dB 20 dB 40 dB 19-20 dB 47.63 dB
(DOWN- state)
Actuation vol. 30 V 15 V 17 V 30 V 15-20 V 82 V 4.8 V

All the measurements were performed using Short-Open-
Load-Thru (SOLT) calibration technique in the frequency
range up to 60 GHz under normal atmospheric conditions.
Switches are actuated with an actuation voltage of 6 V. A
voltage higher than the pull-in voltage is used in order to get
high isolation. The measurement results show an insertion loss
of less than 0.55 dB and an isolation of -47.6 dB at 40 GHz.
C. Discussion
In this paper, the design fabrication and characterization of
a capacitive RF MEMS switch is presented. Considering
aforementioned issues, we have proposed the switch geometry
which actuates at a very low voltage. The fabricated switch
actuates at a very low pull-in voltage of 4.8 V and shows
insertion loss of 0.55 dB and isolation of 47.63 dB at 40
GHz. In Table II the performance of this device is compared
with state-of -the-art devices reported in recent literature. This
indicates that the performance of this device is not
compromised to achieve the low pull-in voltage
characteristics. Repeated operation up to 10 million cycles did
not indicate any degradation in the RF performance. The
excellent RF performance makes these switches a suitable
choice for very high frequency (K-band and above)
applications.
V. CONCLUSIONS
A capacitive RF MEMS switch with a very low-actuation
voltage has been fabricated and characterized. This device is
fabricated on a glass substrate using a simple four-mask
surface micromachining process. The tested switches actuates
at a very low voltage of 4.8 V and shows excellent RF
performance up to 40 GHz. A comparison with recent
literature indicates that none of the RF performance
parameters are compromised in this design. Repeated
measurements up to 10 million cycles did not show any
degradation in the performance. This proves, the approach for
low actuation voltage helps in enhancing the longevity of
capacitive RF MEMS switches.
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