• Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Materials
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.92-97
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• 2016

This paper presents design and simulation of wide band RF microswitch that uses electrostatic actuation for its operation. RF MEMS devices exhibit superior high frequency performance in comparison to conventional devices. Similar techniques that are used in Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) can be employed to design and fabricate MEMS devices and traditional batch-processing methods can be used for its manufacturing. The proposed switch presents a novel design approach to handle reliability concerns in MEMS switches like dielectric charging effect, micro welding and stiction. The shape has been optimized at actuation voltage of 14-16 V. The switch has an improved restoring force of 20.8 μN. The design of the proposed switch is very elemental and primarily composed of electrostatic actuator, a bridge membrane and coplanar waveguide which are suspended over the substrate. The simple design of the switch makes it easy for fabrication. Typical insertion and isolation of the switch at 1 GHz is -0.03 dB and -71 dB and at 85 GHz it is -0.24 dB and -29.8 dB respectively. The isolation remains more than - 20 db even after 120 GHz. To our knowledge this is the first demonstration of a metal contact switch that shows such a high and sustained isolation and performance at W-band frequencies with an excellent figure-of merit (fc=1/2.pi.Ron.Cu =1,900 GHz). This figure of merit is significantly greater than electronic switching devices. The switch would find extensive application in wideband operations and areas where reliability is a major concern.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.58-64
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• 2006

In this study, we describe a low-temperature wafer-level thermocompression bonding using electroplated gold seal line and bonding pads by electroplating method for RF-MEMS devices. Silicon wafers, electroplated with gold (Au), were completely bonded at $320^{\circ}C$ for 30 min at a pressure of 2.5 MPa. The through-hole interconnection between the packaged devices and external terminal did not need metal filling process and was made by gold films deposited on the sidewall of the throughhole. This process was low-cost and short in duration. Helium leak rate, which is measured to evaluate the reliability of bonded wafers, was $2.7{\pm}0.614{\times}10^{-10}Pam^{3}/s$. The insertion loss of the CPW packaged was $-0.069{\sim}-0.085\;dB$. The difference of the insertion loss between the unpackaged and packaged CPW was less than -0.03. These values show very good RF characteristics of the packaging. Therefore, gold thermocompression bonding can be applied to high quality hermetic wafer level packaging of RF-MEMS devices.

• Journal of the Microelectronics and Packaging Society
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• v.12 no.3 s.36
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• pp.197-205
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• 2005

Development of the packaging is one of the critical issues for commercialization of the RF-MEMS devices. RF MEMS package should be designed to have small size, hermetic protection, good RF performance and high reliability. In addition, packaging should be conducted at sufficiently low temperature. In this paper, a low temperature hermetic wafer level packaging scheme for the RF-MEMS devices is presented. For hermetic sealing, Au-Sn eutectic bonding technology at the temperature below $300{\times}C$ is used. Au-Sn multilayer metallization with a square loop of $70{\mu}m$ in width is performed. The electrical feed-through is achieved by the vertical through-hole via filled with electroplated Cu. The size of the MEMS Package is $1mm\times1mm\times700{\mu}m$. By applying $O_2$ plasma ashing and fabrication process optimization, we can achieve the void-free structure within the bonding interface as well as via hole. The shear strength and hermeticity of the package satisfy the requirements of MIL-STD-883F. Any organic gases or contamination are not observed inside the package. The total insertion loss for the packaging is 0.075 dB at 2 GHz. Furthermore, the robustness of the package is demonstrated by observing no performance degradation and physical damage of the package after several reliability tests.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2004.10a
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• pp.50-54
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• 2004

A numerical system to extract effective elastic properties of polycrystalline thin-films for MEMS devices is already developed. In this system, the statistical model based on lattice system is used for modeling the microstructure evolution simulation and the key kinetics parameters of given micrograph, grain distributions and deposition process can be extracted by inverse method proposed in the system. In this work, the effects of kinetics parameters on the extraction of effective elastic properties of polycrystalline thin-films are studied by using statistical method. The effects of the fraction of the potential site( $f_{P}$ ) and the nucleation probability( $P_{N}$ ) among the parameters for deposition process of microstructure on the extraction of effective elastic properties of polycrystalline thin-films are studied.d.d.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.22 no.11 s.176
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• pp.173-181
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• 2005

We report on the design and fabrication of an electrostatic 2-axis MEMS stage possessing a platform with a size of $5{times}5mm^2$. The stage, as a key component, would be used in developing probe-based storage devices in the future. It was fabricated by forming numerous $5{\times}5{\mu}m^2$ etching holes in the central platform, as a result, reducing the total number of masks to 1, thereby simplifying the whole fabrication process. Experimental results show that the driving range of the stage was $32{\mu}m$ at the supplied voltage of 20V and the natural frequency was approximately 300Hz. The mechanical coupling between x- and y-motion was also measured and verified to be $25\%$.

• Journal of Applied Reliability
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.487-500
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• 2005

MEMS devices usually have micro actuators contained in a cavity, If the pressure level of testing chamber is higher than that of cavity, moisture will ingress into the cavity, which may cause critical failure such as stiction of the moving parts. To design an accelerated life test based on high temperature and high humidity, such a phenomena should be considered. In this study, a throughput model that can estimate the amount of moisture ingress is used to decide the testing time and conditions of a high temperature and high humidify test.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.15-19
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• 2002

A new vacuum packaging process in wafer level is developed for the surface micromachining devices using glass silicon anodic bonding technology. The inside pressure of the packaged device was measured indirectly by the quality factor of the mechanical resonator. The measured Q factor was about 5$\times10^4$ and the estimated inner pressure was about 1 mTorr. And it is also possible to change the inside pressure of the packaged devices from 2 Torr to 1 mTorr by varying the amount of the Ti gettering material. The long-term stability test is still on the way, but in initial characterization, the yield is about 80% and the vacuum degradation with time was not observed.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2000.07c
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• pp.2198-2200
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• 2000

This paper reports on the measurement of angle between micro mirror and substrate in. the Micro Optical Cross Connect(MOXC). MOXC consists of beam collimators and $N{\times}N$ micro mirrors that are fabricated by using MEMS technology. Using subpixel level image processing, it is possible to measure the angle with the resolution of 0.27$^{\circ}$.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.49-56
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• 2007

MEMS-based storage is being developed as a new storage media. Due to its attractive features such as high-bandwidth, low-power consumption, high-density, and low cost, MEMS storage is anticipated to be used for a wide range of applications from storage for small handhold devices to high capacity mass storage servers. However, MEMS storage has vastly different physical characteristics compared to a traditional disk. First, MEMS storage has thousands of heads that can be activated simultaneously. Second, the media of MEMS storage is a square structure which is different from the platter structure of disks. This paper presents a new request scheduling algorithm for MEMS storage that makes use of the aforementioned characteristics. This new algorithm considers the parallelism of MEMS storage as well as the seek time of requests on the two dimensional square structure. We then extend this algorithm to consider the aging factor so that starvation resistance is improved. Simulation studies show that the proposed algorithms improve the performance of MEMS storage by up to 39.2% in terms of the average response time and 62.4% in terms of starvation resistance compared to the widely acknowledged SPTF (Shortest Positioning Time First) algorithm.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.481-482
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• 2006

Chemical-mechanical polishing, the dominant technology for LSI planarization, is trending to play an important function in micro-electro mechanical systems (MEMS). However, MEMS CMP process has a couple of different characteristics in comparison to LSI device CMP since the feature size of MEMS is bigger than that of LSI devices. Preliminary CMP tests are performed to understand material removal rate (MRR) with blanket wafer under a couple of polishing pressure and velocity. Based on the blanket CMP data, this paper focuses on the consumable approach to enhance MEMS CMP by the adjustment of slurry and pad. As a mechanical tool, newly developed microstructured (MS) pad is applied to compare with conventional pad (IC 1400-k Nitta-Haas), which is fabricated by micro melding method of polyurethane. To understand the CMP characteristics in real time, in-situ friction force monitoring system was used. Finally, the topography change of poly-si MEMS structures is compared according to the pattern density, size and shape as polishing time goes on.