Effective Stress Modeling of Membranes Made of Gold and Aluminum Materials Used in Radio-Frequency Microelectromechanical System Switches

Abstract

Microelectromechanical system switches are becoming more and more popular in the electronics industry; there is a need for careful selection of the materials in the design and fabrication of switches for reliability and performance issues. The membrane used for actuation to change the state of an RF switch is made mostly using gold or aluminum. Various designs of membranes have been proposed. Due to the flexure-type structures, the design complexity increases, which makes stress analysis mandatory to validate the reliability and performance of a switch. In this paper, the effective stress and actuation voltage required for different types of fixed-fixed membranes is analyzed using finite element modeling. Effective measures are presented to reduce the stress and voltage.