Temperature dependence of ESD charging in RF MEMS capacitive switch

Abstract

The paper presents analyses of the dielectric charging in RF-MEMS devices that have been submitted to electrostatic discharge (ESD) stress. A wafer level Human Body Model (HBM) tester has been used to generate discharge signals. The investigation intends to understand the failure mechanism and the charging mechanism in capacitive RF-MEMS due to ESD. The experiments were done on MEMS and also on Metal-Insulator-Metal (MIM) devices, fabricated on the same wafer in order to get insight on failure modes and charging models. Furthermore, temperature ranges from 300 K to 330 K allows the understanding of physical mechanisms that may be responsible for the device's reliability.