Analysis of actuation voltage using high dielectric materials in radio frequency MEMS switch

The radio frequency microelectromechanical systems (RF MEMS) based switch experiences pull-in instability due to electrostatic actuation mechanism. The switch actuating element is thin parallel plate capacitor electrodes separated by air gap and dielectric material. This paper simulates the RF MEMS switch in MATLAB software to evaluate its performance in terms of pull-in voltage and displacement at 295 K. The effect of using different dielectric materials (SiO
2
, Si
3
N
4
, Al
2
O
3
, HfO
2
, and TiO
2
) with different thickness, different electrode length on pull-in voltage and contact force have been analyzed. The pull-in hysteresis behavior considering multilayered micro-actuation bending beam model is also evaluated with different dielectric material thickness and different movable electrode length. The simulation results reveal that HfO
2
exhibit significant better performance than the other dielectric materials.