Study on SR-Crossbar RF MEMS Switch Matrix Port Configuration Scheme with Optimized Consistency

Abstract

The performance consistency of an RF MEMS switch matrix is a crucial metric that directly impacts its operational lifespan. An improved crossbar-based RF MEMS switch matrix topology, SR-Crossbar, was investigated in this article. An optimized port configuration scheme was proposed for the RF MEMS switch matrix. Both the utilization probability of individual switch nodes and the path lengths in the switch matrix achieve their best consistency simultaneously under the proposed port configuration scheme. One significant advantage of this scheme lies in that it only adjusts the positions of the input and output ports, with the topology and individual switch nodes kept unchanged. This grants it a high level of generality and feasibility and also introduces an additional degree of freedom for optimizations. In this article, a universal utilization probability function of single nodes was constructed and an optimization objective function for the SR-Crossbar RF MEMS switch matrix was formulated, which provide a convenient approach to directly solving the optimized port configuration scheme for practical applications. Simulations to demonstrate the optimized dynamic and static consistencies were conducted. For an 8 × 8 SR-Crossbar switch matrix, the standard deviations of contact resistances of 128 units and losses of all 64 paths decreased from 1.00 and 0.42 to 0.51 and 0.23, respectively. These results aligned closely with theoretical calculations derived from the proposed model.

Keywords

• RF MEMS
• switch matrix
• topology
• port configuration
• consistency