Push–Push Electrothermal MEMS Actuators with Si-to-Si Contact for DC Power Switching Applications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
MEMS switches offer great advantages over solid-state and conventional electromechanical switches, including a compact size and high isolation. This paper presents a novel silicon-to-silicon (Si-to-Si) MEMS switch featuring two suspended actuated platforms for DC power switching applications. The proposed design uniquely incorporates dual suspended chevron actuators, enabling bidirectional actuation, enhancing force generation, and improving overall switching performance. Leveraging the robustness of silicon, this Si-to-Si contact switch aims to enhance the reliability of MEMS-based DC power switches. Testing of a fabricated device in the PiezoMUMPs process demonstrated that a 2 μm initial contact gap closes at 1.1 VDC, with a total actuation power of 246 mW. The switch exhibits a linear voltage–current response up to 5 mA of switching current and achieves a minimum contact resistance of ~294 ± 2 Ω, one of the lowest reported for Si-to-Si contacts. This low contact resistance is attributed to the suspended contact platforms, which mitigate misalignment. The measured response time was 4 ms for turn-on and 2.5 ms for turn-off. This switch withstood a breakdown voltage of up to 376 V across the 2 µm contact gap. Moreover, the 200 nm thick oxide layer separating the actuation and signal lines exhibited breakdown at 183 V. These findings highlight the potential of the switch for high-voltage applications and pave the way for further enhancements to improve its reliability in harsh environments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".