A positive exploitation of ESD events: Micro-welding induction on ohmic MEMS contacts

摘要

The adoption of ESD events to systematically induce micro-welding formation on ohmic RF-MEMS switches is proposed. The established procedure for accelerated testing was verified with success on electrostatically actuated micro-machined switches having different topologies, and it was used to assess the efficiency of a heat-based active restoring mechanism.