Impact of Power Handling Capability on Material Selection of RF-MEMS Switches using MCDM Techniques

摘要

Material Selection is the most important and first step in designing and fabrication process of a device, which consumes lot of valuable time of a researcher if done manually by analyzing each material individually. This study presents a very effective approach that allows the determination of best material out of a pool of materials according to the requirement of design. Three MCDM (multiple criteria decision making) approaches Ashby’s, TOPSIS and VIKOR are used to analyze the impact of power handling capability on material selection of RF-MEMS capacitive switches. Material selection is done so that the device can have high dielectric permittivity, resistivity, Young’s modulus, thermal conductivity and low expansion coefficient value. Priority of these indices vary according to the low and high power levels and to achieve these objectives materials are investigated to have high capacitance ratio, low hold down voltage, lower decay of polarization, good dielectric rigidity and thermal stability. Results shows that TiO2 is an adequate material for dielectric of RF-MEMS switches at low power and at high power A1N is ranked at top.