Novel General Purpose Switched Capacitor/Varactor Design Concept in RF-MEMS Technology for Emerging 5G/6G and Super-IoT Applications

The currently under-deployment 5G, as well as the future 6G and Super-IoT paradigms, is demanding and will go on demanding for high-performance, frequency agile, and reliable RF passive components, ranging from simple switches to articulated devices, phase shifters, impedance matching tuners, RF power step attenuators, filters, and so on, with pronounced characteristics of reconfigurability and/or tunability. RF-MEMS is one of the most suitable technologies able to meet these challenges, as its recent market absorption is demonstrating. In this paper, we discuss a novel design of switched capacitor/varactor entirely designed in RF-MEMS technology, optimized against a mitigation of the activation (pull-in) voltage, as well as an increase of the ON-state capacitance. In particular, multi-physical simulations are reported and discussed, after having validated the Finite Element Method (FEM) tools against experimental datasets. Moreover, physical samples are currently under fabrication and will be reported in the final paper.