The Mechanical Effects Influencing on the Design of RF MEMS Switches

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The reviewer believes that authors have done a proper job of addressing the comments. The submission is in an appropriate shape for publication in the journal.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer of MDPI Journal of Electronics,

We appreciate your time spent and thank you for reviewing our review, as well as for your appreciation and the opportunity to publish in the journal.
Your comment regarding the editing of the English language style has been reviewed and amended. In addition, the "Introduction" section has been expanded somewhat to better justify the needs and objectives in this review.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Authors have addressed my questions for the manuscript. The quality has been well improved. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer of MDPI Journal of Electronics,

We appreciate your time spent and thank you for reviewing our review, as well as for your appreciation and the opportunity to publish in the journal.
Your comment regarding the editing of English spelling has been reviewed and amended.
In addition, the "Introduction" section has been expanded somewhat to better justify the needs and objectives in this review.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

I believe this paper has some value and can be published. While there are some issues with the approach used and reported in the original manuscript, the new version seems satisfactory and I have deemed this paper now suitable for publication. But I would prefer Sensor Journal than Electronics one.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer of MDPI Journal of Electronics,

We appreciate your time spent and thank you for reviewing our review, as well as for your appreciation and the opportunity to publish in the journal.
In response to your recommendation regarding the publication of the submitted review in the journal "Sensors": at the moment we would like to publish the submitted review in the journal "Electronics", however, when sending the following manuscripts related to this topic, we will take into account your comment and send the manuscript to the journal "Sensors".
However, in this version of the review, the "Introduction" section has been slightly expanded to better justify the needs and objectives of this review.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

The authors have significantly modified the manuscript, particularly removed the proposed solution presented in the previous version. Some of my previous comments have been adequately addressed, but others (about half of them) still remain unaddressed. I don't like to repeat myself on these comments.  I suggest the authors to go through the list of comments from reviewers and prepare response to each item in a separate document. 

The removal of the proposed solution in the manuscript makes sense, making it strictly a review paper. The introduction section needs further improvement though, particularly to justify the needs for this review and the main goals stated in the last paragraph of the introduction given the fact that research on RF switches has been ongoing for decades and other reviews have been out there. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer of MDPI Journal of Electronics,

We appreciate your time and thank you for reviewing our review.
In this version of the review, the "Introduction" section has been slightly expanded to better justify the needs and objectives of this review.
In addition, we send your responses to your initial comments and changes reflected in the review as a separate file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript surveys various sources of destabilization in operation of RF MEMS switches. Design considerations are also surveyed to minimize faults in performance of the switches under such circumstances. Finally, a new shock tolerant switch design is proposed. The manuscript require some major modification before being considered for publication in the journal.

Major:

Part 3 of the manuscript is dedicated to "vibration" as a prime source of destabilization. However, the reader cannot get an insight, what are sources of random or periodic vibrations in practice? What are the magnitudes of such vibrations or harmonics which needs to be considered. Authors need to at least mention a specific application and suggest empirical values.

The same for shock and linear acceleration. How much impact or force is tolerated in comparison with electrostatic force used for actuation of a switch.

In all these sections, mathematical relations are introduced. Again, what are physical implications of these functions.
   Figure 10 is completely copied from the following article without properly referencing. Authors have to ask permission to use the exact graphics or sentences from the source, unless it is a plagiarism.

Mohd-Yasin, Faisal, D. J. Nagel, and C. E. Korman. "Noise in MEMS." Measurement Science and Technology 21, no. 1 (2009): 012001.

The same for sentences 311-312 on Page 11; these sentences were copied without proper references from above article.

Many parts of section 7 are copied from the same article.

There is not any experimental or analytical results to prove if authors claim on shock tolerant of the proposed architecture is valid. Authors need to add at least finite element simulation or theoretical values to support their claim.  What is the immunity of the proposed structure to mechanical noise or other sources of destabilization mentioned earlier in the manuscript?

Minor:

Page 19, line 556: Figure 18 should be mentioned instead of Figure 16.

 

 

Reviewer 2 Report

A design of RF MEMS switch with capacitive contact type is presented. Rich information of relevant literatures on this topic is studied. Authors may consider the following suggestions.

General comment.

As mentioned earlier, handful background information is presented in the manuscript, and very less information is focused on the main claim. At first, this manuscript gives an impression of review paper, instead of research paper. This might need to be addressed carefully.

Technical comment.

The section 9, the proposed method of increasing the shock resistance of the MEMS switch design is present. In my opinion, many information is missing in this important section. First, it would be better if the general fabrication or development steps are introduced here, instead of giving a reference of 69. Second, in figure 1 (b), the moveable part of MEMS switch is illustrated. Compared with the design in Fig. 19, or 20, the mechanical latch is the main difference. How this latch part is designed, fabricated, dimension, etc.? This is part of the main contribution of this manuscript. Third, a pale description of the latch design, with a movement model is not good enough for a research paper. A good scale of experiments to show its performance and demonstrate the new design is better than the state-of-the-are should be demonstrated here too.

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,

it's quite interessting topic in MEMS area as RF MEMS switches are quite important MEMS products. But the paper is not reflecting the actual state-of-art. The influence of mechanical stresses in MEMS components and MEMS packages on mechanical MEMS devices have been studied and investicated intensively in many papers up to now. The literatures used in the paper are quite old.

The only one innovative thing in the paper is the proposed concept. Authors should focus more on design and realization of this concept and submits new papers.

Best regards

 

Reviewer 4 Report

The manuscript presents a review of various adverse mechanical factors that could affect the operation of the MEMS RF switches and the existing techniques to reduce the influence of one of the factors -- shock. Overall as a review paper, the manuscript has a good value in compilation of relevant knowledge and existing work on the topic. However, the biggest drawback is the significant language issue with most of the sections in the manuscript, to the degree that make it very difficult to comprehend (though some sections are much better, such as the noises sections.). Other aspects that need to be improved are described below. Major revision is needed.

Line 15: "sensors and actuators" should be replaced with "microsensors and microactuators" or something similar. Throughout the manuscript, the authors tend to use a phrase at the beginning of a paragraph as a subsection title, sometimes with and sometimes without italicizing. In some places this phrase is full-line long. Such kind of format is rather confusing and should be avoided. E.g., a separate line for a short italicized subsection title. Line 23-24, "from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions". Unit should be included.  Line 27-28: "Further search for developers..." No idea what this is referring to.  Line 30-46: The described performance specs should be summarized in a table for easy comprehension.  Line 51-52: "is 10% per year: from 2.3 billion dollars in 2018 to 4.4 billion dollars in 2024". Apparently the number for 2024 is a projection, but the language used makes it sound like real value. Line 55-57: The environmental conditions should be applicable to both commercial products and research prototypes. This sentence should probably be changed to state that the adverse conditions hinder the transition of research prototypes to commercial products.   Line 58-75: This whole paragraph is verbose and lots of self-repeating. It should be condensed to less than half of current length. Line 92: "According to a number of well-known scientists"; This is not a good way to present an argument. What are the citations? Figure 3 doesn't match to the narratives, missing stationary and non-stationary. Section 3.1 structure can be improved. The current organization of the section is confusing in the flow. Section 7 is disproportionately long, particularly the discussion on Brownian noise, which appears to be loosely tied to the focus of the overall manuscript but turns out to be the longest section. This should be significantly cut down or even removed.  Figure 12 is nice. Please add citation numbers after each item in the figure. It would be good to have sections for mitigating effects of vibration, linear acceleration, etc, similar to Section 8 and 9 for the shock.