Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 February 2011
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.