MEMS for Telecommunications: Devices and Reliability

This paper presents an overview on MEMS devices for telecommunications and the reliability issues. MEMS for antenna switches, tunable capacitors, inductors, resonators and other devices have been extensively developed for wireless communication applications. For optical network infrastructure, MEMS for optical network infrastructure, MEMS for optical cross connects, gain equalizers, add-drop multiplexers, WDM/DWDM switches and others have been successfully demonstrated. Significant knowledge has been gained on MEMS failure modes and design/processing guidelines. Improvements on device lifetime and environmental robustness hold the key to ultimate success of MEMS product commercialization.