A Plastic W-Band MEMS Tunable Filter

A plastic, W-band MEMS tunable filter has been successfully demonstrated by built-in deformable membranes. The filter has been fabricated using a MEMS-based process with plastic micro embossing process and gold electroplating. Two movable membranes of 1.6mm in diameter are designed as part of a two-cavity iris filter to actively change the cavity geometry for frequency tuning. Prototype filter has been fabricated and measured with bandwidth of 4.05GHz centered at 94.79GHz with a minimum insertion loss of 2.37dB and return loss better than 15dB. A total of 2.59GHz center frequency shift has been achieved when membranes deflect from -50mum to +150mum