Design of NEMS contact switch for wide frequency applications

With the rapid development of wireless communication, it's highlighted now to applying Micro/nano Electro Mechanical Systems(MEMS/NEMS) technique in the Radio Frequency(RF) field to manufacture subminiature and good performance RF-NEMS. In this paper, A nano-scaling NEMS series contact switch is designed, fabricated, scanning and measured, which has a moveable membrane with the upper gold electrodes, as well as the contact metal bar, underneath the SiON dielectric bridge. This structure results in electrically isolating bias from the RF signal, simplifying the fabrication process, and decreasing the pull-in voltage to a certain extent. The measured data show the pull-in voltage of 24.1V and the good RF performance of the insertion loss of beyond −20dB @0–40GHz on the “on” state, the isolation of below −38dB at 0–20GHz on the “off” state, indicating that the witch is suitable for the 0–30GHz applications.