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Performances of the metal-to-metal contact radio frequency (RF) MEMS switches largely rely on the contacts. A novel contact employing the microspring structure is demonstrated in this paper. The microspring contact can achieve a stable contact at lower actuation voltage, alleviating mechanical wear on the contacts, and can effectively increase the fabrication tolerance. An in-line Pt–Au microspring contact switch was fabricated and characterized. To evaluate the improvement in performance, the results were compared with those of the Au–Au solid contact switch without a microspring design. The highest current handled by the Pt–Au microspring contact was 150 mA per contact, whereas only 20 mA was handled by the Au–Au solid contact. The insertion loss of the Pt–Au microspring contact switch was –0.2 dB at 20 GHz, which was comparable with that of the Au–Au solid contact switch. The isolation of the Pt–Au microspring contact switch was –22 dB at 20 GHz, and that of the Au–Au solid contact switch was –18 dB. With the Pt–Au microspring contact, the switch exceeds its power handling ability and reliability with comparable RF performances.

Nanoscale air/vacuum channel devices have shown great potential in extreme environments, high speed and low power consumption applications. Progress in fabrication, structure and material optimization keeps emerging. However, it remains...

A novel multistage attitude determination alignment algorithm with different velocity models is proposed to implement the alignment process of in-motion attitude determination alignment (IMADA) aided by the ground velocity expressed in body frame () in this paper. Normally, The-based IMADA is used to achieve the coarse alignment for strapdown inertial navigation system (SINS). The higher the coarse alignment accuracy, the better initial condition can be achieved to guarantee the performance of the subsequent fine alignment. Consider the influence of the principal model errors and the calculation errors on the alignment accuracy in traditional-based IMADA, this paper deals with a novel alignment algorithm by integrating two different velocity-based IMADAs and the multiple repeated alignment processes. The power of this novel alignment algorithm lies in eliminating the principal model errors and decreasing the calculation errors. Then, the higher alignment accuracy is achieved. Simulations and vehicle experiment are performed to demonstrate the validity of the proposed algorithm.