RF-MEMS switches offer great potential benefits such as high isolation, low insertion loss, low power consumption, and excellent linearity characteristics. Most MEMS switches are fabricated using surface micromachining techniques by taking advantage of the IC processing techniques. Little work has been done on bulk micromachining for fabricating MEMS switches.

This work contributes to two main areas in the MEMS switch field, (1) a Sacrificial-Layer-Free (SLF) method to fabricate switches using bulk titanium MEMS (BT-MEMS) and multilayer lamination techniques, and (2) development of a novel composite contact material and integration into BT-MEMS switches for testing. This approach for fabricating MEMS switches offers advantages from five aspects to attack the fabrication and reliability issues. Four generations of Bulk-Ti MEMS (BT-MEMS) switches were developed. They were improved through developments of high aspect ratio bulk Ti etching, Titanium-On-Insulator structure, multilayer lamination, mechanical design, and a new contact material. The first generation proved the feasibility of the concept of the BT-MEMS switch. The second generation had a good contact resistance.

Development of the novel Nano-Structured-Titania (NST) composite material allowed further improvement of the third generation. We used the BT-MEMS switch as a platform for testing this new, novel contact material. Due to the preferred surface properties of the NST-metal composite material such as roughness and hardness, the third generation switched above 15 billion contact cycles without adhesion failure. Contact resistance was further improved in the fourth generation switch by integrating the NST-metal composite material into the top part as bumps. Above 100 million cycles with good contact resistance values were achieved.