Impact of miniaturization on the current handling of electrostatic MEMS resonators

This paper studies the scaling of nonlinearities with miniaturization in double-ended-tuning-fork (DETF) MEMS resonators. We find that the increase in resonant frequency associated with beam length reduction strongly improves current handling; e.g. shortening the beams by a factor of 5 results in a 100- fold increase in sustainable signal current. Using the nonlinear models and scaling observed in this work, we present considerations for optimization of the resonant structure design and the electrostatic gap size.