This paper presents a novel SU-8 micromachining process for MEMS series switch fabrication. The switch is designed with a clamped-clamped SU-8 (5 μm)/Cu (2 μm)/SU-8 (3 μm) beam structure driven by electrostatic force, which is fabricated on a silicon substrate with a resistivity of ∼5 cm. Experimental results show that the switch can exhibit better than −4.48 dB insertion loss and −28.2 dB isolation up to 12 GHz. Such a large insertion loss is mainly caused by substrate loss which can be further reduced down to −0.75 dB as long as the substrate resistivity is increased up to 100 cm.

This letter presents a power consumption reduction scheme of magnetic microactuation using Cu–Ni nanocomposite film which is electroplated in alkaline noncyanide based Ni colloidal copper plating solution at 40°C. The superconducting quantum interference device magnetometer measurements show that Cu film is modified from diamagnetism to ferromagnetism via the incorporation of Ni ferromagnetic nanoparticles into itself to form a Cu–Ni nanocomposite film. A magnetic microactuator made of the nanocomposite can have about 9% performance improvement in terms of actuation enlargement. In other words, the coil made of the Cu–Ni nanocomposite can exhibit better power efficiency for the same output displacement.

The letter presents the fabrication and characterization of on-chip spiral inductors with Ni-anodic alumina oxide (Ni-AAO) nanocomposite core. Ni nanorods with 70 nm diameter are deposited and isolated in an AAO matrix to form a layer of nanocomposite on silicon substrate. About 3% inductance enhancement to the inductor with the nanocomposite core has been observed and the enhancement can be kept up more than 6 GHz. Because the proposed inductance enhancement scheme using ferromagnetic-AAO-based nanocomposite as inductor core employs a CMOS-compatible fabrication process with the characteristics that can be further improved, it is our belief that the scheme has a great potential application for future radio frequency integrated circuitry (RFIC) manufacture.Index Terms-Anodic alumina oxide (AAO), inductance, magnetic resonance, Ni-anodic alumina oxide (Ni-AAO) nanocomposite core, Ni nanorods, quality (Q) factor, spiral inductor.

NiP diamond and NiP carbon nanotube ͑CNT͒ nanocomposite films have been synthesized and compared in this paper. Because diamond has different shapes and sizes than CNTs, the nanocomposite films exhibit distinct characteristics. Nanoindentation measurements show that the Young's modulus and hardness of the NiP -CNT nanocomposite film electroplated in a bath with 0.028 g/L CNTs increase to 665.9 ± 29.5 GPa and 28.9 ± 4.22 GPa, respectively, which is about four times larger than that of pure nickel. On the contrary, the modulus and hardness of the NiP diamond nanocomposite films decrease with the incorporation of the nanodiamond powders due to the formation of voids and cracks, even though both diamond and CNTs have similar Young's modulus and hardness. For the NiP diamond film plated in the bath with 2.0 g/L nanodiamonds, the values are reduced to 110.5 ± 4.3 and 2.3 ± 0.1 GPa. Nevertheless, the electrothermal actuators made of both NiP -CNT and NiP diamond composites can provide four times the maximum elongation, larger than that made of pure nickel. With the same displacement, the input power of the nanocomposite actuators is much less than that of the pure Ni one. This study reveals potential applications for nano/microelectromechanical systems fabrication using both NiP diamond and NiP -CNT nanocomposites due to their distinctive physical properties and compatibility with contemporary complementary metal oxide semiconductor manufacturing processes.

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