Unlocking Endurance with MEMS Technology: Extending Relay Lifespan by 1000x
Bright Toward, a leading manufacturer of a variety of relay technologies, partnered with Menlo Micro, the company responsible for bringing to market the greatest electronic component innovation since the transistor with its Ideal Switch®, to leverage the Ideal Switch® in their unique module design.
This case study explores the realities of modern high intensity semiconductor testing, and how Bright Toward embraced innovation with Menlo Micro’s Ideal Switch® to not only achieve EMR-like performance with a switching solution with 3 orders of magnitude longer lifespan, but also how they achieved this in an overall package that is a fraction of the size of comparable EMRs.
By leveraging Menlo Micro's technology, Bright Toward engineers were able to take advantage of the novel architecture to cascade several Ideal Switches in a non-intuitive manner to achieve substantially higher insertion loss without significantly reducing the isolation.
Challenges
• Electromechanical relay (EMR) failures were causing unacceptable amounts of downtime and service requests.
• Available solutions, such as solid state switches, cannot match EMR isolation, insertion loss, or linearity, and there have not historically been other viable options to replace EMRs for precision switching applications.
Solutions
• Explore Menlo Micro’s Ideal Switch® technology as a potential EMR replacement in cycle-intensive semiconductor test environments.
• Create a switch module replacement for EMRs with integrated driver and communications fully compatible as a drop-in replacement for preexisting EMRs.
MIXO S-PARAMETER
Results
Through clever engineering, Bright Toward was able to achieve EMR-like performance with Menlo Micro's Ideal Switch® technology that exceeded customer expectations.
The Future
Bright Toward is looking to move to higher frequency solutions and more complex switching solutions leveraging Menlo Micro's Ideal Switch® technology.
If you're interested in learning more about our products, you can download the full case study or get in touch with us by filling out the form below. We'd love to hear from you!
- File Download
- Related Products
DC to 18GHz, SP*T RF Switch Module
MIXO
This is a customizable multi-pole multi-throw RF MEMS Switch Module with a frequency range from DC to 18GHz. This RF MEMS Switch Module has outstanding...
Details Add to cart
