This thesis presents realization of two shunt, capacitive contact RF MEMS switches and two RF MEMS SPDT switches for microwave and millimeter-wave applications, two zero-level package structures for RF MEMS switches and development trials of a BCB based zero level packaging process cycle. Two shunt, capacitive contact RF MEMS switches for 26 GHz and 12 GHz operating frequencies are designed, fabricated and consistencies between fabricated devices and designs are shown through RF measurements. For the switch design at 26 GHz and at the operating frequency, return loss in the upstate is measured to be 27.61 dB, insertion loss and isolation in the downstate is measured to be 0.21 dB and 27.16 dB, respectively. For the switch design at 12 GHz and at the operating frequency, return loss in the upstate is measured to be 38.69 dB, insertion loss and isolation in the downstate is measured to be 0.05 dB and 25.84 dB, respectively. Quite accurate circuit models have been obtained for both of the RF MEMS switches. Two RF MEMS SPDT switches, which utilize the shunt, capacitive contact switches as building blocks are designed through circuit simulations. These two designs are fabricated and their RF measurements have been completed. It is shown from circuit model simulations that, the performances of the fabricated devices and desired responses corresponded to each other. For the SPDT switch design at 26 GHz, return loss at the input port is measured to be 12 dB and insertion loss is measured to be 1.24 dB. For the SPDT switch design at 12 GHz, return loss at the input port is measured to be 5.6 dB and insertion loss is measured to be 0.49 dB. The reason behind the unexpectedly bad performances has been investigated and discovered. The bad performances were due to a common mistake in the layouts of both SPDT switches. These mistakes are corrected in the circuit models and expected performances are obtained. Two different zero-level package structures which use high-resistive Si wafers have been suggested and required design changes have been made on the RF MEMS shunt, capacitive contact switches and SPDT switches in order to minimize the package effects. For this purpose polygonal CPW transitions have been designed and integrated into the designs, followed by the necessary tunings in the switch structures for which EM and circuit simulations are utilized. For the suggested package structures to be produced, two possible process cycles have been studied. One of the process flows was based on KOH anisotropic Si etching and the other one was based on DRIE (Deep Reactive Ion Etching). Great progress has been achieved in the latter process cycle, however this process cycle still needs some more study and it could not be completed in the time required for this thesis study.

This thesis presents the design, fabrication, and measurement of tunable frequency microstrip antennas using RF MEMS (Microelectromechanical Systems) technology. The integration of RF MEMS components with radiators enable to implement tunable systems due to the adjustable characteristics of RF MEMS components. In the frame of this thesis, different types of structures have been investigated and designed. The first structure consists of a microstrip patch antenna which is loaded with a microstrip stub whose length is controlled by RF MEMS switches. In the other structure, the length of a microstrip patch antenna is changed by connecting a metal plate using RF MEMS switches. The third structure is composed of a microstrip patch antenna and a microstrip stub on which RF MEMS variable capacitors are placed periodically to control the resonant frequency. In order to maintain an easier integration with RF MEMS capacitors, another structure consisting of a microstrip patch antenna and a coplanar waveguide (CPW) stub which is loaded with variable RF MEMS capacitors is designed. The final structure is a dual frequency CPW-fed rectangular slot antenna whose resonant frequencies are shifted by RF MEMS variable capacitors placed on a short circuited stub inserted inwards the antenna. The fabrication of CPW-fed rectangular slot antenna is completed in the MEMS fabrication facilities of METU using RF MEMS process based on electroforming on glass substrate. The measurement results show that RF MEMS components might be a proper solution to obtain tunable frequency antenna structures.

Ces travaux de recherches s’inscrivent dans le cadre d’une amélioration du bilan de liaison des données de télémesures sur les lanceurs spatiaux. Pour cela, un dispositif d’antenne à pointage électronique a été choisi. Celui-ci utilise un réseau de quatre antennes patchs alimentés par un prototype composé d’un diviseur de puissance 1 vers 4 et de quatre déphaseurs. Les états de phases choisis pour chacun des déphaseurs sont 0°, 90° et 180°. Après une étude bibliographique, les meilleurs déphaseurs pouvant assurer cette fonction sont les déphaseurs à base de coupleur hybride. Grâce à l’utilisation de MEMS-RF dans ces circuits, il est n’est pas nécessaire de rajouter des amplificateurs de puissance, car ces composants sont faibles pertes RF et linéaires. Plusieurs topologies de déphaseurs à base de coupleur hybride utilisant ces commutateurs ont été étudiés. D’après cette étude, il a été possible de réduire la taille des circuits sans détériorer les performances RF, ce qui nous a permis d’en choisir deux d’entre eux. Un commande à distance est nécessaire pour ces dispositifs alors une boîte à relais a été choisie pour assurer ce rôle. Le premier prototype est composé d’un diviseur de puissance qui a été commandé et de quatre déphaseurs fabriqués. Le deuxième prototype est entièrement intégré sur puce, ce qui a permis de réduire la surface du dispositif ainsi que d’améliorer les pertes RF. Ces travaux ont donc pu montrer la faisabilité de fabriquer un prototype simple, faible pertes, et linéaire. / These research works is within the context of an improved link budget telemetry data on space launchers. For this device, an electronically steerable antenna was chosen. It uses an array of four patch antennas supplied by a prototype composed of a power splitter 1 to 4 and four phase shifters. For each selected phase shifters, the phase states are 0 °, 90 ° and 180 °.After a bibliographical study, the best phase shifters that can perform this function are the shifters based on hybrid coupler. Thanks to the use of RF-MEMS in these circuits, it is not necessary to add power amplifiers because these components are linear and present low RF losses. Several topologies of phase shifters based on hybrid coupler using RF-MEMS were studied. According to this study, it was possible to reduce the size of circuits without damaging the RF performance, which allowed us to choose two of them. A remote control is needed for these devices to relay box then was chosen for this role. The first prototype consists of a power divider which was commissioned and produced phase shifters. The second prototype is fully integrated on-chip, which has reduced the device surface and improves the RF losses.These studies were able to demonstrate the feasibility to produce a simple linear prototype with low RF losses.

Ce manuscrit traite de la fiabilité de micro-composants électro-mécaniques que l'on appelle des MEMS (Acronyme anglais signifiant Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems). Les MEMS sont utilisés dans un grand nombre de domaines et le domaine qui nous concerne est celui des télécommunications. Plus précisément, notre domaine de travail se situe autour des radio-fréquences où les MEMS vont principalement réaliser des fonctions de commutation. On appellera ainsi nos composants des MEMS-RF, RF signifiant Radio-Fréquence. Dans ce domaine, les MEMS sont des candidats à fort potentiel grâce à une faible consommation de puissance, leur performance dans le domaine RF, leur encombrement et leur poids. De plus, en utilisant un procédé de fabrication dérivé de celui des semi-conducteurs, leur coût de production reste relativement faible. Dans ce manuscrit, on s'intéresse à la fiabilité de ces composants car c'est le dernier verrou avant une éventuelle industrialisation. Les principaux mécanismes de défaillance sont abordés dans une première partie, puis ce manuscrit se concentre sur l'étude du fluage mécanique et des facteurs d'accélération de modes de défaillance. On verra notamment l'influence de la température et des conditions de fonctionnement sur la durée de vie des commutateurs. / The thesis deals with reliability of tiny electro-mechanical components called MEMS. MEMS stands for Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems. These components, designed for switching applications, are suitable candidates for telecommunications due to their low power consumption, Radio-Frequencies (RF) performances, compactness and lightness. A MEMS is fabricated using processes of integrated circuit manufacturing that makes its cost relatively low. Few of these components are commercially available and more are expected to be in the market as soon as reliability issues will be solved. Reliability issues studied in the thesis regard mechanical creep and acceleration factors. The mechanical creep occurs in our suspended structures whilst enduring a constant force, it results in deformation of structures and shift of parameters. Two innovative test benches are developed to assess mechanical creep in RF-MEMS switches. The acceleration factors are keys to conduct accelerated testings and predict lifetime of RF-MEMS switches. Parameters such as bias voltage, input-to-output voltage, temperature are varied to assess lifetime of switches and extract these acceleration factors.

Au cours des dernières années, l’essor spectaculaire des microsystèmes (ou MEMS), qui touche tous les domaines industriels, est à l’origine de nombreux et nouveaux progrès technologiques. Néanmoins, dans ce contexte prometteur de large envergure, la fiabilité des MEMS s’avère être la problématique à améliorer pour franchir la phase d’industrialisation à grande échelle. C’est dans le cadre de cette thématique de fiabilité des microsystèmes, que s’inscrit ce travail.La température étant un paramètre majeur entrant dans de nombreux mécanismes d’endommagement des MEMS, notre étude présente la conception et la réalisation d’un banc de thermographie infrarouge de haute résolution (2 µm), associé à la mise en œuvre d’une méthodologie d’analyse et de traitement des mesures infrarouges.Ce dispositif innovant permet un diagnostic in-situ, sans contact et rapide des défaillances des MEMS par mesures locales et quantitatives des pertes thermiques associées. Cet outil constitue une avancée importante pour détecter, mesurer et comprendre les mécanismes d’endommagement des MEMS. Il nous permet de reconstituer des images thermiques de tout type de microsystème en cours de fonctionnement ou soumis à des tests de vieillissement accéléré, et ceci afin de réaliser une analyse fine et rapide de leur fiabilité.Ce travail apporte de nouveaux résultats en ce qui concerne la détection des mécanismes de défaillance de différents types de MEMS-RF et tout particulièrement des MEMS-RF avec contact électrique. / Over the last few years, considerable effort has gone into the study of the failure mechanisms and reliability of MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS). MEMS performance and reliability are affected by many parameters, such as the complex physical interactions between thermo-mechanical deformation, current flow, high power actuation and contact heating. In particular, temperature is a key issue for the design of a low loss and reliable MEMS. In order to improve device reliability it is essential to understand the thermal behaviours of RF-MEMS under standard or harsh current conditions. In this work, we present a new approach to investigate the failure mechanism of MEMS. An original set-up has been developed to localise and measure the heat loss of MEMS during actuation. Thermal characterization has been performed using infrared thermography to investigate the thermal sensitivity of MEMS. A brand new infrared bench was developed for temperature distribution measurement. An infrared camera, operating in the 1,5 - 5 µm bandwidth, was coupled to a new specific optic to reach an enhanced spatial resolution better than 2 µm/pixel. This work presents several results obtained on different advanced RF-MEMS including RF-MEMS switches where failure mechanism had been diagnosed.

De nos jours, les antennes sont de plus en plus complexes en raison notamment de la nécessité de réaliser une reconfigurabilité en fréquence et/ou en diagramme. Les réseaux réflecteurs et les surfaces sélectives en fréquence sont des candidats particulièrement intéressants pour couvrir les besoins actuels. Cependant, en raison de leur grande taille et de la complexité géométrique croissante de leurs cellules élémentaires, l‘analyse électromagnétique complète de ces structures rayonnantes nécessite énormément de ressources informatiques (mémoire) et exige des temps de calcul prohibitifs, notamment lorsque des éléments de commande tels que des MEMS-RF sont intégrés au sein des cellules. Les techniques numériques classiques basées sur un maillage (spatial ou spectral) systématique ne parviennent pas à simuler de manière efficace de telles structures multi-échelles et nécessitent souvent des ressources informatiques difficiles d’accès pour le concepteur d'antennes. Une technique originale baptisée « Scale Changing Technique (SCT) » tente de résoudre ce problème en segmentant le réseau en de multiples domaines imbriqués les uns dans les autres et présentant divers niveaux d'échelle. Le multi-pôle par changement d’échelle, appelé « Scale Changing Network (SCN) », modélise le couplage électromagnétique entre deux niveaux d’échelle successifs. Ce multi-pôle peut être calculé en résolvant les équations de Maxwell à partir d’une Formulation par Equations Intégrales. La mise en cascade des multi-pôles par changement d’échelle permet alors le calcul de la matrice impédance (ou admittance) de surface du réseau complet. Cette matrice peut à son tour être utilisée pour simuler la diffusion électromagnétique d’une onde incidente par le réseau. Le calcul des différents multi-pôles par changement d’échelle peut être effectué séparément de sorte que le temps de simulation du réseau complet peut être considérablement réduit en parallélisant le calcul. Par ailleurs, la modification de la géométrie de la structure à une échelle donnée, lors de la phase de conception, nécessite seulement le calcul de deux multi-pôles par changement d’échelle et ne requiert pas une nouvelle simulation de toute la structure. Cette caractéristique fait de la SCT un outil de conception modulaire. Dans le cadre de cette thèse, la SCT a permis de tenir compte de la taille finie des réseaux et de modéliser efficacement les couplages électromagnétiques entre les cellules élémentaires. Des réseaux réflecteurs uniformes et non uniformes ont été simulés par la SCT et les performances numériques de la méthode ont été analysées. / Future antenna architectures especially for space applications are becoming more and more complex due to the need of reconfigurability. This reconfigurability is needed in terms of frequency, reliability, radiation pattern and power consumption. In this context, reflectarrays and frequency selective surfaces (FSSs) are particularly the hottest domains of RF design. The accurate analysis of electromagnetic (EM) scattering from such type of complex finite-sized reflectarray antenna structures is of great practical interest. However due to their large electrical size and complex cellular patterns specially when tuning elements such as RF-MEMS are also integrated within the array elements, conventional full-wave EM analysis of such multiscale structures either fail or require enormous amount of computational resources to resolve prohibitively large number of unknowns. Moreover the characterization of large structures would normally require a second step for optimization and fine-tuning of several design parameters, as the initial design procedure assumes several approximations. Therefore a full-wave analysis of the initial design of complete structure is necessary prior to fabrication to ensure that the performance conforms to the design requirements. A modular analysis technique which is capable of incorporating geometrical changes at individual cell-level without the need to rerun the entire simulation is extremely desirable at this stage. An indigenous technique called Scale Changing Technique (SCT) addresses this problem by partitioning the cellular reflectarray geometry in numerous nested domains and subdomains defined at different scale-levels in the array plane. Multi-modal networks, called Scale Changing Networks (SCNs), are then computed to model the electromagnetic interactions between any two successive partitions by method of moments (MoM) based integral equation approach. The cascade of these networks allows the computation of the equivalent surface impedance matrix of the complete array which in turn is utilized to compute far-field radiation patterns. Full-wave analysis of both passive and active (electronically tunable by RF-MEMS) reflectarrays has successfully been performed by the SCT while utilizing very small amount of computational resources as compared to conventional full wave methods. Moreover, to speed up the SCT modeling of the reflectarrays, equivalent electrical circuit models have been extracted and applied for individual design and optimization of the reflectarray phase shifter elements.

This thesis presents development of microwave lumped elements for a specific surface-micromachining based technology, a self-contained mechanical characterization of fixed-fixed type beams and realization of a shunt, capacitive-contact RF MEMS switch for millimeter-wave applications. Interdigital capacitor, planar spiral inductor and microstrip patch lumped elements developed in this thesis are tailored for a surface-micromachining technology incorporating a single metallization layer, which allows an easy and low-cost fabrication process while permitting mass production. Utilizing these elements, a bandpass filter is fabricated monolithically with success, which exhibits a measured in-band return loss better than -20 dB and insertion loss of 1.2 dB, a pass-band located in S-band and a stop-band extending up to 20 GHz. Analytical derivations for deflection profile and spring constant of fixed-fixed beams are derived for constant distributed loads while taking axial effects into account. Having built experience with the mechanical domain, next, Finite Difference solution schemes are established for pre-pull-in and post-pull-in electrostatic actuation problems. Using the developed numerical tools / pull-in, release and zipping phenomena are investigated. In particular, semi-empirical expressions are developed for the pull-in voltage with associated errors not exceeding 3.7 % of FEA (Finite Element Analysis) results for typical configurations. The shunt, capacitive-contact RF MEMS switch is designed in electromagnetic and mechanical domains for Ka-band operation. Switches fabricated in the first process run could not meet the design specifications. After identifying sources of relevant discrepancies, a design modification is attempted and re-fabricated devices are operated successfully. In particular, measured OFF-state return and insertion losses better than -16.4 dB and 0.27 dB are attained in 1-40 GHz. By applying a 20-25V actuation, ON-state resonances are tuned precisely to 35 GHz with an optimum isolation level of 39 dB.

Dual band (K and Ka) electronically scanning reflectarray with RF MEMS switches is designed, implemented and measured. Unit cell of the reflect array is composed of conductor backed split-ring elements. In order to steer the beam, the phase of the incident circularly polarized wave is controlled by RF MEMS switches that modify the angular orientation of split-rings individually. Reflectarray is designed using unit cell approach with periodic boundary conditions. The antenna is fabricated by using surface micromachining process developed in METU MEMS Center. Radiation patterns of the antenna are measured and compared with the simulations. It has been shown that the reflectarray is capable of beam switching to 35&deg / in Ka band, 24&deg / in K band.

A system packaging level approach on liquid crystal polymer (LCP) was proposed for low cost, lightweight, and compact wireless communication systems. Via technology was explored for V-band W-band transitions and an active cooling system that are essential for compact multilayer integration. RF MEMS switches were fabricated and integrated at the component level to enable multi-functional devices with optimal performance. A pattern reconfigurable antenna for MIMO applications and 3D phase shifters for phased array antennas that use RF MEMS switches were presented. In addition, a lightweight expandable array was designed and measured with up to 256 elements on multilayer LCP integrated at the system level. Furthermore, a 60 GHz multilayer transceiver front end device with simultaneous transmit and receive was designed and measured for low cost 60 GHz applications. The wide variety of multilayer LCP applications integrated at the system level shows a promising future for the next generation low cost lightweight wireless communication systems.

Le fil rouge guidant nos travaux de recherche correspond à la convergence des techniques hyperfréquences, des micro- et nano-technologies et plus récemment de la fluidique, amenant le développement de microsystèmes hyperfréquences innovants pour des applications en télécommunication et en biologie. Nous retraçons, au travers de notre habilitation à diriger des recherches, nos travaux sur les approches multidisciplinaires permettant le développement de microsystèmes hyperfréquences communicants pour lesquels notre leitmotiv fut de tirer au mieux partie des potentialités des micro et nano-technologies. Des composants et circuits RF-MEMS (RadioFrequency MicroElectroMechanical Systems), à l'intégration des nanotechnologies au sein de microsystèmes hyperfréquences, à la miniaturisation de fonctions passives ainsi qu'à leur co-intégration avec des circuits actifs au sein de microsystèmes. Nous présentons de plus notre projet de recherche visant à explorer l'alliance des microsystèmes hyperfréquences avec d'autres disciplines telles que la fluidique et la biologie pour de nouvelles fonctionnalités et applications. Nous tenterons de répondre aux questions scientifiques : "comment les microsystèmes hyperfréquences peuvent aller au delà des fonctionnalités et applications traditionnelles, quelles sont les opportunités ainsi ouvertes ?"