Investigation of Stiction Effect in Electrostatic Actuated RF MEMS Devices

The main failure mode of electrostatic actuated RF MEMS, the stiction of the bridge due to dielectric charging, is investigated using an appropriate methodology based on the MEMS microwave performances measurement for the failure detection and on the threshold voltages evolution monitoring for the failure analysis. The authors present an advanced investigation of this failure mode, the "dynamic S₂₁(V) measurement", in order to extract some failure driving parameters and the authors finally propose a solution to avoid this failure and improve RF MEMS reliability