Anti-Stiction And Self-Recovery Active Mechanisms For High Reliability RF-MEMS Switches

Reliability of RF-MEMS devices is one of the main concerns of the engineers and scientists dealing with such type of devices. In particular, there are plenty of studies and investigations devoted to protection of devices from dierent kind of failures related to their operating conditions. The adhesion of movable parts of switches onto the actuation electrode, also referred to as stiction, due to accumulated charge or to micro-welding phenomenon, are the most common types of RF-MEMS failures. This work presents a novel effective heat-based mechanism that enables to release a stuck component. Such mechanism can be embedded within the switches of any topology and it has no influence on the normal behavior of the device.