A large consortium of European companies and universities are half way through the 36-month project to develop CMOS-compatible RF MEMS processes and devices, along with efficient electromechanical models and simulation methodologies.

The total budget of the project is 2.5 million euros (about $2.9 million) and the contribution from the European Union is less than $1 million (about 850,000 euro) a source close to the project said.

The participants include: Thales Airborne Systems (Paris, France) as the system-level user of the technology, TRONIC'S Microsystems (Grenoble, France) as the MEMS foundry and Athens-based Helic is providing design and modeling expertise. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne - EPFL (Switzerland), the University of Cambridge (UK) and the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble - LPCS (France) are also contributing research to the WIDE-RF project.

Under conventional European collaborative research rules commercial companies can receive 50 percent of their costs in such projects while academic institutions can receive up to 75 percent of their costs.

The project is intended to ease the penetration of micro-machined structures in wireless systems for commercial applications such as cellular telephony and WLAN, as well as aviation and satellite electronics.

The partners' efforts are focussed on developing design and fabrication methodologies for MEMS devices such as RF switches and tunable inductors and capacitors that can be applied in reconfigurable RFIC and microsystems architectures across a range of frequencies spanning 800-MHz to 10-GHz.

The developed devices, when they emerge, should be applicable to tunable RF filters, wideband voltage-controlled oscillators and delay-lines for smart antenna arrays.

One expected outcome of the project is the production of a WIDE-RF library of electronic models for MEMS fabricated high-Q inductors, capacitive switches, and tunable elements that would be compatible with commercial circuit simulators and EDA frameworks.

On the reliability front, the consortium expects to deliver studies on the environmental and operational limits of RF MEMS components, and resolve some severe reliability issues inherent in some of them.

"A large effort in the WIDE-RF project is put on developing innovative wafer level packaging solutions inspired from TRONIC'S Microsystems patented technology used for custom accelerometers. Such packaging should limit the creation of parasitic capacitance. As the MEMS manufacturing expert, TRONIC'S Microsystems will ensure the manufacturability of the solutions and is ready to industrialize and produce the future wideband RF devices that will be the outcome of this common work," said Marjorie Trzmiel, RF MEMS project leader at TRONIC'S Microsystems, in a statement.

"Helic will be enhancing its RFIC inductance modeling platform with MEMS-specific options and act as the focal point for library build-up. We see significant long-term benefits in our multi-mode RFIC development activity, as well as our EDA activity which is now starting up," added Sotiris Bantas vice president of technology at Helic, in the same statement.

However while some of the MEMS intellectual property expected to come from the project will not be ready for a further 18 months, the RFIC inductance modeling platform, including the MEMS capability, is believed to be more or less ready now.

Helic was founded by engineers from the National Technical University of Athens in May 2000.