Integrated electrothermal modeling of RF MEMS switches for improved power handling capability

RF MEMS switches have been presented by several researchers for use in transmit/receive switch circuits, tunable filters, and beam steering of antenna arrays (Nguyen, C.T.-C. et al., 1998; Goldsmith, C. et al., 2001). The benefits of RF MEMS switches are their low on-impedance, high off-impedance, highly linear behavior, and, in many cases, nearly zero power consumption (Rebeiz, G.M. and Muldavin, J.B., 2001). Drawbacks of RF MEMS switches include slow switching, high actuation voltage, high packaging cost, and low power handling capability (Rebeiz and Muldavin). Of these challenges, there appears to be substantial room to improve power handling without sacrificing device performance. Hence, this paper focuses on developing models predicting the power handling capability of a switch and corroborating these models with experiments. In particular, our model incorporates a new finite element-boundary integral method to solve for the electromagnetic fields.