Design and Performance of a J Band MEMS Switch

This paper presents a novel J band (220–325 GHz) MEMS switch design. The equivalent circuits, the major parameters, capacitance, inductance and resistance in the circuit were extracted and calculated quantitatively to carry out the radio frequency analysis. In addition, the mechanical property of the switch structure is analyzed, and the switching voltage is obtained. With the designed parameters, the MEMS switch is fabricated. The measurement results are in good agreement with simulation results, and the switch is actuated under a voltage of ~30 V. More importantly, the switch has achieved a low insertion loss of ~1.2 dB at 220 GHz and <~4 dB from 220 GHz to 270 GHz in the “UP” state, and isolation of ~16 dB from 220 GHz to 320 GHz in the “DOWN” state. Such switch shows great potential in the integration for terahertz components.

Center Clamped Forward Converter for High Current Applications

High current applications like Microprocessors, Fuel cells, Electric Hybrid Vehicles, Solar Cells etc., use interleaved isolated buck derived converter. Interleaving of converters for such high current applications converters is done to achieve reduced input capacitor ripple voltages, output capacitor ripple current cancellation and reduced peak currents of output inductors. Generally, interleaving requires a higher number of transformers through which distributed magnetics can be achieved. i.e., one bulky transformer can be replaced with low power profile transformers. The performance of forward converter depends on core resetting of the main transformer. The core’s magnetizing energy is recycled by resetting it. In the absence of core reset, the current builds up at each switching cycle, saturates the core, causes reverse recovery problem in the diode and the active clamp will no longer in zero voltage state during turn on of the main switch. The transformer secondary output is used as a gating pulse for Synchronous Rectifiers. These have very low forward drop which are most suitable for high current applications. Among various used clamping methods, the transformer core is optimized effectively by Active center clamp reset approach. The proposed method results in less number of switches and clamping capacitor, and lower cost compared to conventional forward converter. Reduction in voltage stress without losing duty-cycle ratio is also achieved by means of a series-parallel connected switch structure with Self Driven Synchronous Rectifiers. The proposed center clamp converter overcomes the Maximum Duty cycle limitation of 50%. This paper mainly focuses on active center clamp forward converter and is also compared with Active Positive Negative clamping techniques.

Is biopolymer hair a multi-responsive smart material?

A twin-netpoint-switch structure model for animal hair has been proposed for interpreting different shape memory abilities when exposure on different external stimuli, where a twin-netpoint/single-switch structure is for the stimulus of water, heat and UV-light, and a single-netpoint/twin-switch structure is for the stimulus of redox agent.