Reduction of squeeze-film damping in a wafer-level encapsulated RF MEMS DC shunt switch

This paper presents the design, fabrication and characterization aspects of a wafer-level encapsulated RF MEMS shunt switch with a perforated base substrate and a corrugated diaphragm. A three-wafer stacking concept was proposed to achieve a RF MEMS shunt switch based on metal–metal contact. The introduction of damping holes in the base substrate wafer is proven to be an effective way to reduce squeeze-film damping and thus increase the switching speed of the switch. It is also demonstrated by analytical calculation that some factors play important roles on the damping characteristics, such as the physical location of damping holes in the base substrate, hole size, and number of holes per radius ring. By means of the implementation of damping holes, the pull-in and release time of the fabricated MEMS switch are significantly reduced by about 13 times, from 5.4 ms to 0.435 ms and 40.6 ms to 3.2 ms, respectively.