Secondary DOF and their effect on the instability of electrostatic MEMS devices

The purpose of this work is to demonstrate the significance, and to quantify and model the effect, of secondary degrees-of-freedom (DOF) on the response and instability of electrostatically actuated MEMS devices. Also, a novel reduced-order modeling approach is presented, and is used to interpret and analyze the measured electromechanical response of fabricated test devices. This novel modeling approach is shown to be more efficient than current state-of-the-art reduced-order models that are based on voltage iterations.