Determination of bulk discharge current in the dielectric film of MEMS capacitive switches

Abstract The present work presents a new method to calculate the discharge current in the bulk of dielectric films of MEMS capacitive switches. This method takes into account the real MEMS switch with non uniform trapped charge and air gap distributions. The assessment of switches with silicon nitride dielectric film shows that the discharge current transient seems to obey the stretched exponential law. The decay characteristics depend on the polarization field’s polarity, a fact that comes along with experimental results obtained from the thermally stimulated depolarization currents (TSDC) method used in MIM capacitors.

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