Leading and trailing edge hot switching damage in a metal contact RF MEMS switch

Author

Basu, Anirban ; Hennessy, Ricky ; Adams, George ; McGruer, Nicol

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Northeastern Univ., Boston, MA, USA

fYear

2013

fDate

16-20 June 2013

Firstpage

514

Lastpage

517

Abstract

This paper describes the hot switching damage in a MEMS switch contact. Under hot switched conditions, material transfer leading to contact erosion causes the performance of RF MEMS switches to degrade over their lifetime. Hot switching performance of RF MEMS switches is one of the major reliability issues and is presently affecting the marketability of these devices despite their proven advantages over solid state switches which are currently used in RF systems. The phenomena leading to such damage both at the leading and trailing edge of a switching cycle are investigated in this paper.

Keywords

electrical contacts; microswitches; reliability; contact erosion; leading edge hot switching damage; marketability; material transfer; metal contact RF MEMS switch; reliability; solid state switch; trailing edge hot switching damage; Anodes; Cathodes; Contacts; Materials; Microswitches; Radio frequency; MEMS switches; RF MEMS; electrical contacts; field emission; hot switching; material transfer; microswitch;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Solid-State Sensors, Actuators and Microsystems (TRANSDUCERS & EUROSENSORS XXVII), 2013 Transducers & Eurosensors XXVII: The 17th International Conference on

Conference_Location

Barcelona

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/Transducers.2013.6626816

Filename

6626816