Candidate
Nazli Kheirabi
Title
Millimeter-Wave Reconfigurable CMOS-MEMS Integrated Devices
Supervisor
Raafat Mansour
Abstract
The millimeter-wave spectrum has sparked interest recently as a promising alternative to meet bandwidth requirements for wireless local area networks, vehicular radars, short-range multi-Gb/s links, and next-generation cellular system communications (5G). The unlicensed 7 GHz ISM band around 60GHz is of particular interest. Compared to semiconductor technologies, Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) have the potential to realize reconfigurable millimeter-wave devices with superior performance in terms of linearity, insertion loss and DC power consumption.
This thesis presents the development and fabrication of miniaturized, low insertion loss, high isolation RF MEMS switches implemented in CMOS chips through the use of a post-processing technique. Several CMOS-MEMS switches operating at 60GHz and 77GHz are demonstrated. Prototype units for SPST, SP3T switches and a distributed MEMS transmission line (DMTL) network are integrated on CMOS 0.35 µm. The challenges involved in realizing CMOS-MEMS devices at mm-wave frequencies are also addressed in this work.