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Published on: August 15, 2014
A High-Reliability RF MEMS Metal-Contact Switch Based on Al-Sc Alloy
Zhongxuan Hou1,2, Yongkang Zhang1, Chaowei Si1
1Engineering Research Center for Semiconductor Integrated Technology, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100083, China.
Abstract:
This paper presents a new metal-contact RF MEMS switch based on an Al-Sc alloy. The use of an Al-Sc alloy is intended to replace the traditional Au-Au contact, which can greatly improve the hardness of the contact, and thus improve the reliability of the switch. The multi-layer stack structure is adopted to achieve the low switch line resistance and hard contact surface. The polyimide sacrificial layer process is developed and optimized, and the RF switches are fabricated and tested for pull-in voltage, S-parameters, and switching time. The switch shows high isolation of more than 24 dB and a low insertion loss of less than 0.9 dB in the frequency range of 0.1-6 GHz.
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