Reliability Assessment of an Ultrathin Dielectric Transduced Micromechanical Resonator

This paper presents breakdown and reliability study in an ultrathin dielectric transduced micromechanical device. A metal-insulator-metal (100nm:12.7nm:400nm) ring shaped structure is fabricated. The device geometry can be used as a flexural resonator as well as a switch or an actuator. The fabricated device has a mode frequency of 15.85MHz and quality factor of 4054 in air, and a deflection of 171nm at 3.3V dc bias without experiencing pull-in. The device has a stability for 10594sec at a continuous 5V dc bias, followed by degradation and eventual breakdown at 16646sec. Experimental results show that the device endured over 26,600sec before breaking down for continuous bipolar bias of +/-5V pulse voltage with a frequency of 2Hz, serving as a performance benchmark.