(A) study on high reliability of MEMS relay for high power switching application

Abstract

This thesis suggests highly reliable MEMS relay to be applied to commercial relays or power applications. Since MEMS relays have batch fabrication based on photolithography and ideal I-V characteristic, it is expected that MEMS relay is applied to various field. It is known that MEMS Relay have a high potential to be applied by the power application, which is the area occupied by commercial relays in various fields. However, MEMS relays have issues to apply to power applications due to the reliability problem at high power. In order to solve this reliability problem, I propose a MEMS Relay that combines the technology of the core technology of reliability improvement at high current, and the core technology of reliability improvement at high voltage. We call this newly proposed MEMS relay a Three Step Spring System

We fabricated and evaluated the proposed MEMS relay using this Three Step Spring System. We demonstrated the low contact resistance with the characteristics of the proposed relay compared to the conventional MEMS Relay and proved that we realize high reliability at high power. As a result, we believe that MEMS relays that incorporate these three-step spring systems will provide a platform for replacing commercial relays as well as semiconductor testing component.