French firm DelfMEMS has micromachined a 12-way RF switch, and will be showing prototypes at Mobile World Congress.

“Until now, companies have tended towards the capacitive switch solution route. We chose contact or Ohmic switching because of the superior performance,” said CEO Cybele Rolland. “This is a key milestone for the company and we have already signed several contracts, with more in the pipeline, and anticipate shipping in the second half of 2016.”

The potential benefits of real switch contacts, according to the firm, are low insertion loss, isolation and linearity for uplink carrier aggregation in LTE-A. “Early samples of the SP12T switch have performance levels that are comparable to the current market leading solutions but for production devices the performance levels will be significantly higher,” it claimed.

 The company’s switch is an electrostatically-deflected anchorless push-pull device, said to resist arcing between its contacts, and sticking.

Performance, of capped switches made in industrial foundries, is -0.2dB insertion loss and -45dB isolation at 2GHz. Typical linearity of high throw-count switches is claimed to be >90dBm – capped is emphasised as packaging can induce stress and change the performance of MEMS.

“These specification requirements will drive MEMS switch technology two to three generations ahead of the best SOI technologies,” claimed DelfMEMS, stating that in a 3G/4G handset, the minimum required receive signal level at the antenna port is -110dBm and the maximum 3G/4G transmit signal level is +23dBm (including compatibility with 2G which requires +33dBm max.

By: DocMemory
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