Applied electrostatic parallelogram actuators for microwave switches using the standard CMOS process

This paper presents the fabrication of a laminated-suspension microwave switch using a conventional 0.6 mum single polysilicon three metals complementary metal-oxide semiconductor process. The post-processing is completed with maskless dry etching. The micromachined microwave switch consists of two electrostatic parallelogram actuators, two T-type connectors and one coplanar waveguide on a p-type silicon. substrate. The switch only requires a low dc voltage of around 18 V for electrostatic traction. The testing results of the microwave switch show that the insertion loss is 6.8 dB and isolation is -7.8 dB in the range 10-20 GHz. In addition to demonstrating the design and fabrication of the microwave switch. this paper summarizes the experimental results.