Morteza Dadgar - Department of Electrical Engineering, Sahand University of Technology, Tabriz, Iran
Esmaeil Najafi Aghdam - Department of Electrical Engineering, Sahand University of Technology, Tabriz, Iran.

Here, a new thermally actuated latching RF MEMS switch is presented. The switch uses two thermal actuators to move an arm in y and z axis which serve as the signal line of CPW waveguide switches. The switch can be actuated ON or OFF by using voltage or current pulse. Using a dielectric (nitride) as an interface between the connection layer at the head of the arm and the thin beam, the RF circuitry is separated from DC actuators, allowing the wide band operation. The proposed switch has simple RF circuitry that makes it suitable for integration with more complex configuration. The switch demonstrates excellent RF performance of better than 0.05dB insertion loss and return loss of better than 20dB for the entire frequency band up to 25GHZ.

RF MEMS Switch Thermal actuator,