ABOUT THE BOOK

This volume from the “Micro and Nanoengineering” series (edited by the Publishing House of the Romanian Academy) includes the papers which have been presented at the 12th “MEMSWAVE” workshop, organized by University of Athens , in June 2011 at Athens, Greece.

The papers are focused on new development in MEMS technologies for RF and millimeter wave circuits. MEMS technologies are now one the most exciting and promising solution to manufacture high performance millimeter wave circuits to be used in the emerging wireless communication systems.

This volume is addressed to all interested people from universities, research institutes or companies working in microwaves, millimeter waves, and MEMS. It will be distributed to the university libraries.

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FOREWORD

The main scope of the MEMSWAVE conference is to bring together scientists from different universities, research institutes, industrial companies interested in the development of the RF-MEMS field, to create a forum for the knowledge exchange between the RF-MEMS players, provide a qualified international forum for researchers and people from the industry, interested in the area and introduce to the most recent advances and achievements, especially on European activities.

The MEMSWAVE workshop was generated by the European project "Micromachined Circuites for Microwave and Millimeter Wave Applications" <<MEMSWAVE>> (1998-2001) coordinated by IMT-Bucharest. The project was nominated between the ten finalists (from 108 participants) to the Descartes Prize 2002.

The first 2 editions were organized at Sinaia (Romania) in 1999 and 2001. A special volume in the series Micro and Nanoengineering "Micromachined Microwave Devices and Circuits" of the Romanian Academy Press, was dedicated to the second edition of the workshop and was published in 2002.

Starting from 2002, the MEMSWAVE workshop is an itinerant European event and has become a reference point for the field, gathering interest from all over Europe and the rest of the world.
The next editions were held in Heraklion and Toulouse. From 2004 the MEMSWAVE workshop was connected to the European FP6 Network of Excellence in RF MEMS "AMICOM" and was strongly supported by this network.

Most of the European teams involved in these challenging topics were partners in the AMICOM project. The workshop was organized in Uppsala (2004), Lausanne (2005), Orvieto (2006), Barcelona (2007) and became conference being important instruments for knowledge dissemination of the AMICOM network results.

In 2008 at Fodele, Greece, took place the first MEMSWAVE conference following the completion of AMICOM. In 2009, the conference was organized by the MemSRaD Research Group of the Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), in 2010 by Universita del Salento, Lecce and in 2011 by University of Athens.

The conference is technically sponsored by the European Microwave Association (EuMA). However, the significant number of contribution has manifested the lasting support of the European RF MST community to this event. It is now a tradition to publish the papers in the Series of Micro and Nanotechnologies of the Romanian Academy Press. Previous volumes may be requested at IMT-Bucharest ([email protected]). The present volume contains the papers presented at the 12th edition of the MEMSWAVE conference organized by University of Athens, in June 2011, in Athens, Greece.

The editors, May 2012