(A) study on high reliability and low actuation voltage of MEMS relay for RF and electrical testing applications

Abstract

This thesis suggests MEMS relay having high reliability and low actuation voltage for RF and electrical testing application. MEMS relay has been received great attention as promising candidate at many applications due to its ideal switching characteristics and batch fabrication based on lithography. Among them, applying the MEMS relay to the RF and electrical testing application has great merits be-cause it carry the testing signal without distortion and has small feature size. However, two critical is-sues should be solved to apply the MEMS relay to the testing application

low reliability at high power and high actuation voltage. We firstly proposed the special technique named two-step spring system and heat sink insulator to solve low reliability at high power. The proposed method can lower thermal dam-age at contact, thus it help to achieve the high reliability at high power. Then, we also proposed novel method to lower the actuation voltage. The method is inspired from failure mechanism named creep, which cause undesired mechanical deformation. We break the common sense of the creep, thus we use it as desired plastic deformation method to lower the air-gap, and thus the pull-in voltage is decreased. Finally, the 4-terminal design, RF characteristics, and packaging was developed. The aforementioned three characteristics should be prepared to use the MEMS relay at commercial application. As a result, we developed MEMS relay suitable to the RF and electrical testing application, and believe it can be ideal candidate at this field.