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SEMICON: CEA-Leti claims major advance in RF MEMS switch fabrication process
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A major advance has been achieved in the reliability of RF MEMS electrostatic actuators, according to CEA-Leti. The research organisation said that its RF MEMS switch technology has reached a new level of maturity, allowing it to provide customers with a significantly improved manufacturing process.The new switch-manufacturing process has been demonstrated on 200mm silicon wafers at the MINATEC dedicated MEMS fabrication platform. Yields close to industrial standards have been achieved, providing thousands of working devices per wafer.
CEA-Leti’s new switch design uses a dielectric-less solution in which an air gap prevents contact between the electrodes when the bridge is down, thanks to small dielectric dots placed under the mobile electrode. As a result, long-term tests show a drastic improvement in reliability and no pull-down voltage drift has been observed during the tests.
Contact reliability has been improved by replacing the gold-based contacts that exhibited poor reliability and high sensitivity to stiction with better-performing ruthenium-based contacts. A hermetic thin-film packaging process also has been developed to prevent organic contamination and to maintain low contact resistance.