Plastic deformation technique using intentionally accelerated creep for performance tuning in MEMS devices

Abstract

In this thesis, an innovative and simple method to achieve a plastic deformation technique in MEMS devices by solely electrical control with ultrafine tuning resolution is proposed. Furthermore, new application is proposed to enhance mechanical reliability in MEMS devices through the proposed plastic deformation technique. The proposed plastic deformation technique adopted the creep phenomenon to achieve the desired plastic deformation. The creep phenomenon can cause plastic deformation with rela-tively weak electrostatic force since the creep phenomenon can be controlled by time, temperature. While voltage input induced stress on the device to start the creep phe-nomenon, Joule heating was applied to accelerate the creep phenomenon. Then, plastic deformation was successfully demonstrated with solely electrical control, where The plastic deformation the tuning resolution was demonstrated at a sub-100nm level. Then, the enhancement of the mechanical reliability was also observed by the mechani-cal failure recovery through the plastic deformation. The recovered value only differ 0.23% from the original value.