An insulating liquid environment for reducing adhesion in a microelectromechanical system

Abstract

Stiction has been one of the major failure problems in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). As a solution for stiction failure, we investigated an insulating liquid environment for MEMS to eliminate adhesion force. We speculated that three forces-capillary, solid-solid contact, and van der Waals (vdW) forces decrease when the devices are operated in an insulating liquid environment. In the experiment, the adhesion force of the devices was measured to be 42.8 mu N on average in air, whereas it decreased to 2.52 mu N on average in the insulating liquid, corresponding to a remarkable 94.1% decrement. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3640228]