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Dry Etching Techniques of Amorphous Silicon for Suspended Metal Membrane RF MEMS Capacitors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2011

Raphaël Fritschi ,
Cyrille Hibert ,
Philippe Flückiger  and
Adrian M. Ionescu
Raphaël Fritschi
Affiliation:
Center of Micro-Nano-Technology (CMI) Electronics Laboratory (LEG) Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL), CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
Cyrille Hibert
Affiliation:
Center of Micro-Nano-Technology (CMI)
Philippe Flückiger
Affiliation:
Center of Micro-Nano-Technology (CMI)
Adrian M. Ionescu
Affiliation:
Electronics Laboratory (LEG) Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL), CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
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Abstract

A novel dry etching technique of amorphous silicon is proposed to suspend the metal membrane of RF MEMS tunable capacitors. The proposed fabrication process is simple and excludes all the drawbacks related to a wet process. Moreover, it has the advantage of being fully compatible with CMOS post-processing. Experimental results demonstrate that the capacitor suspension beams design with meanders can reduce the tuning voltage to less than 5 to 10 V.

Type
Research Article
Information
MRS Online Proceedings Library (OPL) , Volume 729: Symposium U – MEMS and BioMEMS , 2002 , U2.7
Copyright
Copyright © Materials Research Society 2002

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