A Method to Decrease the Energy Consumption of Silicon-Based GeTe Phase-Change RF Switches

This paper proposes a method to decrease the energy consumption of silicon-based GeTe phase-change RF switches (PCSs). The PCS is composed of eight-layer structures. Unlike classical four-terminal indirectly heated PCSs, this new switch adds an AlN thin film as a dielectric barrier between the substrate insulator and substrate. By this method, the problem of energy consumption during the electrical pulses is improved. The simulated results show that the amorphization pulse width is decreased by 22.5% from 200ns to 155ns while the amplitude remains constant, and the crystallization pulse amplitude is reduced by 28.6% from 6.3V to 4.5V while the pulse width remains constant. Meanwhile, this improved model realizes an insertion loss of less than 0.4dB and an isolation of better than 10dB over the 0-40GHz band.