Transient discharge current measurements to study dielectric charging in MEMS

Dielectric charging effect is the most important failure in micro electromechanical switches (MEMS). In this paper we explain a novel method to characterize the dielectric charging phenomena by means of transient discharge current. The most common technique used to quantify the reliability problems on MEMS is capacitance - voltage (C-V). However, the analysis of the transients shows that several time constants are governing the charge dynamics, one of them related to the resistivity-permittivity product of the dielectric and the others can be related to internal dielectric characteristics.