Simulation and Analysis of Actuation Voltage of Electrostatically Actuated RF MEMS Cantilever and Fixed - Fixed Switches with Variable Beam Parameters

Radio Frequency (RF) Microelectromechanical system (MEMS) switches are becoming more and more popular in the electronics industry. The main concern in using RF MEMS switch is its high actuation voltage. Thus the main focus in this paper is to obtain low actuation voltage. This paper presents the simulation and analysis of RF MEMS cantilever beam and Fixed - Fixed beam switches. RF MEMS switches simulated in this paper use electrostatic actuation method. Simulations were done using finite element modeling. Different designs and parameters such as gap between electrodes, beam thickness, beam length, and relative permittivity values of medium between electrodes were chosen for analyzing the deflection of beams for various actuation voltages. Perforations of different dimensions were made on both type of beams and the resulted deflections were studied. The simulation results show that the Cantilever and Fixed - Fixed beams follow approximately similar deflection pattern with Cantilever beam deflecting more for applied actuation voltage in all the studies.