A Study Of Hopping Transport During Discharging In Sinx Films For Mems Capacitive Switches

A more realistic approach of the discharging process in MEMS capacitive switches is presented with the introduction of the effective temperature in order to determine the behavior of the microscopic parameters of hopping conduction, which dominates the process. The use of Kelvin Probe method in MIM capacitors that simulates the discharging process in MEMS switches during up-state revealed that both the increase of temperature and stressing field intensity results the decrease of mean hopping length. This result arises from the simultaneous contribution of the transport energy levels associated with the impact of the stressing field and temperature. Also, a correlation was found experimentally between the stretched exponential decay and the hopping process. The proposed method was also applied in MEMS switches where a similar behavior of the hopping parameters was found, providing evidence that the control of the hopping length to an optimum value can provide fast discharging and low leakage currents, increasing the device lifetime.