Vibrating mechanical tank components, such as crystal and SAW resonators, are widely used for frequency selection in communication systems because of their high Q and exceptional stability. However, being off-chip components, these devices pose an important bottleneck against the ultimate miniaturization and performance of wireless transceivers. This project aims to explore the use of capacitively transduced micromechanical circuits to realize micromechanical mixer-filters with reconfigurable attributes. With their substantial size, cost and performance advantages, these devices can be used to realize a bank of tunable/switchable micromechanical filters for multi-band RF channel selection. By replacing all off-chip components with micromachined passive elements, micromechanical mixer-filters offer an alternative set of strategies for transceiver miniaturization and improvement. In the long term, this overall project aims to demonstrate an RF channelizer utilizing micromechanical elements in its signal path, exclusively, that presents one of the keys to eventually realizing a cognitive radio.
Project end date: 08/05/14