Combined Mechanical and Electrical Analysis of a Microelectromechanical Switch for RF Applications

A combined mechanical and electrical model is used to investigate the non-linear behavior of a high switching rate capacitive microelectromechanical switch for RF and microwave application. The damped spring model is employed to simulate the movement of the switch movable contact, while an ad-hoc solver based on a modified Runge-Kutta method is exploited to solve the electrical circuit at microwave frequency including the effect of the time variable switch capacitance.