Driving Innovation Shortens Design Cycle by 65% for First-to-Market MEMS RF Switch

Founded in 2016, Menlo Micro is an Irvine, California, technology company that leverages its design center in Albany, New York, to innovate advances in material science and develop high-performance microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) switches

With its Ideal Switch, Menlo Micro has created a new category of electronic switches. The switches are made from custom metal alloys plated onto glass wafers with through-glass vias, technology developed in conjunction with partner Corning. The Ideal Switch replaces larger, less efficient relays and switches and eliminates compromises and trade-offs by combining the benefits of electromechanical and solid-state switches

Utilizing its Ideal Switch technology, Menlo Micro is introducing the MM5130, an ultra-low-loss radio-frequency (RF) SP4T switch, to address high-power switching applications up to 26 GHz. The MM5130’s unique design incorporates a novel MEMS cantilever switch built with proprietary metal alloys and enclosed in a fully hermetic glass package

The MM5130 features four channels and 25 W power handling in a miniaturized surface-mount package. The MM5130 brings significant improvements to insertion loss, power handling, and linearity. It offers greater than 99% reductions in size, weight, power, and cost for applications in aerospace / defense, automated test equipment, and communications. The best-in-class insertion loss performance, less than 0.2 dB at 6 GHz, is difficult to design, measure, and verify accurately

Organization:

• Menlo Micro

Challenges:

• accurate 3D EM simulation and integrated design, test, and measurement workflow

• PCB module de-embedding for device performance validation for customer prospects

Solutions:

• PathWave Advanced Design System (ADS), PathWave EM Design (RFPro and EMPro)

• Keysight vector network analyzer with automatic fixture removal

Results:

• First-pass MEMs switch design success

• Close correlation between simulation and measured data

Challenge: Proving Best-in-Class Insertion Loss Performance on New Technology

For the design and test environment, it was critical to achieve first-pass success from die-level design to packaged product module, integrated through the applicationlevel printed circuit board (PCB). This process required an integrated circuit–3D electromagnetic (EM) design environment to simulate and predict the product performance at every stage. With an eye on time to market, Menlo targeted a short design cycle of three to four months for the first product

Designing the package paths with full 3D EM simulations was critical with an extremely low-loss RF switch. Menlo needed to design everything, characterizing the modules with probing and simulating the entire design. Key to customer success was developing test fixtures and evaluation boards that demonstrate the switch’s actual performance. Menlo Micro wanted to validate performance early in the development process, so it chose to implement its own PCB de-embedding algorithms into Keysight’s PathWave Advanced Design System (ADS) software. After reaching confidence in its simulations, Menlo created device prototypes and conducted measurements by wafer probing, which demonstrated first-pass manufacturing success. Then, the engineering team performed measurements on the vector network analyzer (VNA) to compare its simulation results against actual de-embedded device measurements as proof of concept for customers

Because of the unique material set used (MEMS and PCB) with widely differing dimensions, Menlo expected significant meshing issues during EM simulation. Menlo uses metal conductors, plated onto glass substrates, surrounded by an air cavity, with metallic conductors going through glass to get down through the package and onto the circuit board. Figure 1 shows the complexity of the material integration

One of the challenges is that we have two wafers bonding together,” said Dr. Xu Zhu, Menlo Micro’s director of technology. “This is a hermetically sealed cavity with a lot of metal residing on the same level. This created quite a lot of layer meshing issues due to widely different dimensions. To solve this EM problem in a 3D space, the simulator needs to cut the 3D space into numerous tiny tetrahedra to resolve the 3D structures and yet not too many for the EM simulator to handle,” with the MEMS switch sitting on top of a PCB board several inches in size