Amorphous carbon active contact layer for reliable nanoelectromechanical switches

This paper reports an amorphous carbon (a-C) contact coating for ultra-low-power curved nanoelectromechanical (NEM) switches. a-C addresses important problems in miniaturization and low-power operation of mechanical relays: i) the surface energy is lower than that of metals, ii) active formation of highly localized a-C conducting filaments offers a way to form nanoscale contacts, and iii) high reliability is achieved through the excellent wear properties of a-C, demonstrated in this paper with more than 100 million hot switching cycles. Finally, a full inverter using a-C contacts is fabricated to demonstrate the viability of the concept.