Wafer-level Encapsulated High-performance Mems Tunable Passives and Bandpass Filters

To my family iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Farrokh Ayazi. He has been a great advisor, a strong motivator, and a great inspiration to my work. I feel very fortunate to have had him as my M.S. and Ph.D. advisor, to have had the opportunity to work with him, and to have had his helpful advice for the past five years. He has been always available and willing to have a discussion with me, even on his busiest days. Through all the meetings I have had with him, he has always provided me with great ideas and I am very thankful for that. I would also like to thank my thesis committee members, Dr. Meindl for their support. I would like to specifically thank Dr. Kohl for his helpful advice and for providing me with a lab for electroplating silver. I want to acknowledge my colleagues in the Integrated MEMS (IMEMS) lab for their help and useful discussions. My special thanks go to Dr. Pejman Monajemi for training me on cleanroom equipment, Mr. Hossein Miri Lavasani for his help with the ADS simulations, Mr. Ashwin Kumar Samarao for his help with the fabrication of the HARPSS tunable capacitors, and Mr. Aditya Kapoor for fabricating the filters when I had a broken elbow and could not do the fabrication myself. I also would like to thank Ms. Houri Johari for being always there at work and for making the coffee breaks so enjoyable and fun! The MiRC cleanroom staff at the Georgia Institute of Technology has been very helpful, and I would like to make a special mention of Cristina Celsi. I would also like to thank all my friends here in Atlanta and elsewhere in the United States, who have been like a family to me while I have been far from home for the past five years. Dr. Maneli Noorkami and Dr. Pegah Zamani were, are, and always will be my wonderful friends, with whom I very much enjoy my time. Dr. Mina Sartipi, Dr. Ermal Shpuza, and Ms. Parisa Pooyan have also been great friends. v I also would like to thank my two sisters, Saba and Mehrsa, and my brother-in-law, Amir, for their long distance support and for being there for me at all times. Mehrsa brought laughter into my monotonous Ph.D. life. Saba is the kindest sister …