C-type and R-type RF MEMS Switches for Redundancy Switch Matrix Applications

The objective of this paper is to investigate novel configurations of planar multi-port RF MEMS C-type and R-type switches as basic building blocks of redundancy switch matrices for satellite communications. An in house monolithic fabrication process dedicated to electrostatic multi-port RF MEMS switches is developed and fine tuned. The proposed C-type switch is a four port device with two operational states. This switch illustrates an insertion loss of less than 0.3dB and isolation of about 25dB at satellite C band frequency range. The novel R-type switch is also a four port device with an additional operational state that could drastically reduce the number of required switch elements (up to 50%) in a redundancy switch matrix. The measured results show an insertion loss of better than 0.4dB and isolation of better than 25dB at C-band. This is the first time that an R-type RF MEMS switch is ever reported