A capacitive power sensor based on the MEMS cantilever beam fabricated by GaAs MMIC technology

In this paper, a novel capacitive power sensor based on the microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) cantilever beam at 8?12?GHz is proposed, fabricated and tested. The presented design can not only realize a cantilever beam instead of the conventional fixed?fixed beam, but also provide fine compatibility with the GaAs monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) process. When the displacement of the cantilever beam is very small compared with the initial height of the air gap, the capacitance change between the measuring electrode and the cantilever beam has an approximately linear dependence on the incident radio frequency (RF) power. Impedance compensating technology, by modifying the slot width of the coplanar waveguide transmission line, is adopted to minimize the effect of the cantilever beam on the power sensor; its validity is verified by the simulation of high frequency structure simulator software. The power sensor has been fabricated successfully by Au surface micromachining using polyimide as the sacrificial layer on the GaAs substrate. Optimization of the design with impedance compensating technology has resulted in a measured return loss of less than??25?dB and an insertion loss of around 0.1?dB at 8?12?GHz, which shows the slight effect of the cantilever beam on the microwave performance of this power sensor. The measured capacitance change starts from 0.7 fF to 1.3 fF when the incident RF power increases from 100 to 200 mW and an approximate linear dependence has been obtained. The measured sensitivities of the sensor are about 6.16, 6.27 and 6.03 aF mW?1?at 8, 10 and 12?GHz, respectively.