A Comparative Study Between a Micromechanical Cantilever Resonator and MEMS-based Passives for Band-pass Filtering Application

TL;DR

This paper compares MEMS-resonator and MEMS-passive based band-pass filters for RF applications, focusing on design, fabrication, and performance at 455 kHz for superheterodyne receivers.

Contribution

It provides a detailed comparative analysis of two MEMS-based filter configurations, including their design, simulation, fabrication, and characterization.

Findings

MEMS-resonator filters exhibit lower insertion loss.

MEMS-passive filters show better isolation.

Both filters operate effectively at 455 kHz.

Abstract

Over the past few years, significant growth has been observed in using MEMS based passive components in the RF microelectronics domain, especially in transceiver components. This is due to some excellent properties of the MEMS devices like low loss, excellent isolation etc. in the microwave frequency domain where the on-chip passives normally tend to become leakier and degrades the transceiver performance. This paper presents a comparative analysis between MEMS-resonator based and MEMS-passives based band-pass filter configurations for RF applications, along with their design, simulation, fabrication and characterization. The filters were designed to have a center frequency of 455 kHz, meant for use as the intermediate frequency (IF) filter in superheterodyne receivers. The filter structures have been fabricated in PolyMUMPs process, a three-polysilicon layer surface micromachining process.