Modeling, design and fabrication of MEMS filters for RF applications

Currently, micro electro mechanical systems (MEMS) technology has been used in the fabrication and development of several micro devices which cover a broad range of applications. One of these application areas is the telecommunication industry. Current multi-band communication systems depend on off-chip components for frequency selection stages. Since the fabrication of these off-chip components are not compatible with IC fabrication, the electrical connection has to be in the board level, increasing the cost, size and system complexity. Recently MEMS technology has been used in constructing tunable IC components for RF and wireless transceivers, such as resonators, variable capacitors and inductors. These on-chip components can be utilized to implement system on chip (SOC) transceiver architectures with a better performance. This project is focused on modeling, design, and fabrication of band-pass filters for RF applications using MEMS components. The first class of filters is based on MEMS resonators covering a frequency range from 1MHz to 10MHz and the second class of filters use RF MEMS tunable capacitors. The project has two main parts; the first part is dedicated to the behavioral modeling and generating macro models for MEMS resonators that will be used in system level simulation of the final filter, and the second part discusses the design, fabrication, and post processing of both the MEMS resonators and MEMS variable capacitor, besides the experimental results