A New Efficient Method for Simulating the Dynamic Response of Electrostatic Switches

This paper presents a new efficient technique for simulating the dynamic response of electrostatic micro switches. It is demonstrated that the dynamic response of a switch can be well predicted based on only a few static states of the system. Using energy methods the deformation of the system is approximated by a single adaptive mode, such that time integration is performed on a scalar equation of motion. Due to the high computational efficiency of the proposed method, it can be used to motivate the functional form of damping forces and extract damping parameters, by fitting experimentally measured dynamic responses.