3-terminal tungsten CMOS-NEM relay

The present work describes the design, fabrication and experimental results of a 3-terminal laterally actuated tungsten nanoelectromechanical (NEM) relay which is monolithically integrated in a 0.35 μm commercial standard CMOS technology. The movable structure is released by means of a simple one-step maskless wet etching. The switch shows an abrupt switching with less than 5 mV/decade and a good on-off current ratio of - 10⁴ although it exhibits an on-state contact resistance R_ON around 500 MΩ. Also, the relay is cycled up to 1500 times in ambient conditions showing great endurance but variability in its contact.