Reliability of nanocrystalline diamond MEMS capacitive switches

A solution to mitigate the dielectric charging and to improve reliability of RF MEMS switches is the replacement of the commonly used dielectrics with others that allow fast draining of the injected charges. One of the materials that have been successfully incorporated is diamond. The present paper presents both the charging and discharging process characteristics in MEMS having nanocrystalline diamond dielectric films. The study is performed by monitoring the charging and discharging current transient in MIM capacitors and the shift of the bias for minimum up state capacitance before and after progressively increasing stressing time tests. The results reveal that diamond is very promising material to improve the device reliability.