A new electrothermally actuated 3-state high isolation and low power RF MEMS switch with latching mechanism

This paper presents a new structure for three-state RF MEMS switches with a true mechanical latching mechanism by using U-shaped electro-thermal actuators. This latching mechanism keeps the switch in any of three different states without any power consumption. The mechanism overcomes the high power consumption problem of the thermal actuators. Consequently, the switch consumes power while its transition time between states and the switch does not need a continuous electrical DC current to stay in the desire state. Moreover, by using electro-thermal actuators the required actuation voltage is decreased to 5 V, and the total power consumption of the switch is less than 131.1mW for <;50μs. FEM simulations represent that the return loss and insertion loss of the switch are -15dB and -0.49dB up to 20GHz, respectively. This switch has two different isolations, OFF state isolation and deep-OFF state isolation which are -48dB and -90dB up to 30GHz, respectively. Due to low power consumption and better RF characteristics, this switch has numerous applications in mobile communications.