RF MEMS Switch Design Formulti-Mode Mobile Terminal RF Front-End

With the development of communication technology, heterogeneous wireless communication systems coexist in the world, which makes the multi-mode mobile terminal research become very important. In the multi-mode mobile terminal, RF switch is necessary for hardware sharing, and RF MEMS switch will become the first-choice due to its superior performance to current techniques.In this paper, the basic knowledge about RF MEMS switch is discussed, including the MEMS technology, RF MEMS switch principles, functionalities and performance parameters. Since the main bottlenecks for commercial application of RF MEMS switch are high-power consumption and long response time, this paper focuses on the optimizations of these two parameters.Theoretic analysis about RF MEMS switch is presented in this paper. We discuss the main factors which influence the driving voltage, isolation and insertion loss, and then propose an optimized structure.A low-power consumption RF MEMS series switch is designed using CoventorWare, which is a CAD tool for MEMS-based devices. After optimizing the parameters, this switch has low-voltage consumption and shorter switching time. At last, based on the single model, we design a SP5T switch matrix for the multi-mode mobile terminal RF front-end.