Experimental Study of Electrical Breakdown in MEMS/NEMS Devices With Deep Submicron Gaps

We present, for the first time, a systematic experimental study of the minimum gas breakdown voltage in capacitive micro- and nano-electromechanical system (MEMS and NEMS) devices with deep sub-micrometer transduction gaps in the range of 150–250 nanometers. The experiments use MEMS devices incorporating bulk acoustic wave (BAW) capacitive disk resonators fabricated using the HARPSS+ process as test vehicles. Devices with various gap sizes in the form of wafer-level vacuum encapsulated dies and unencapsulated bare devices were tested to observe the breakdown voltages. The results show a close to linear dependency between the breakdown voltage and the gap size. The findings on the breakdown voltages across nanoscale gaps provide a valuable guideline for future capacitive MEMS designs to ensure device reliability. [2023-0112]