Electrical Contact Reliability in a Magnetic MEMS Switch

Abstract

This paper reports on the reliability issues encountered during the development of a dry ohmic switch fabricated in MEMS technology. Particularly, focus is made on electrical contact reliability. Contact degradation during hot switching tests has been noticed, and leads to switch lifetime limitation. In order to understand this phenomenon, characterizations have been performed on damaged switches and degradation modes have been cleary identified. Solutions have been implemented and finally the Schneider Electric MEMS switch is able to switch 5 V/1 mA loads for several millions of cycles and 14 V/10 mA loads for several 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">4</sup> of cycles.