What are RF MEMS?

Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) is a manufacturing technology used to create miniature mechanical devices with integrated electronics using integrated circuit (IC) batch processing techniques. These components range from few micrometers to millimeters in size and have the ability to sense, control and actuate on the micro scale, and generate effects on the macro scale.

Radio Frequency Microelectromechanical Systems (RF MEMS) are MEMS based Radio Frequency passives components that offer various advantages over conventional microwave devices including improved isolation, lower power dissipation, and reduced cost, size, and weight. There have been a number of companies that have tried to launch RF MEMS products over the years without much success. However, the RF MEMS device which has found some commercial success is switches. We now starting to see some successful implementations of RF MEMS based switches.

RF MEMS technology can be used for various wireless communication applications in smartphones, mobile infrastructure, IoT and defense. They can be used for Antenna Tuning, Impedance matching, antenna beam forming, phase shifting and developing tunable filters for software definable radios (SDR).