Influence of Surface Roughness on Breakdown in Air Gaps at Atmospheric Pressure Under Lightning Impulse

Feet, Odd Christian; Mauseth, Frank; Niayesh, Kaveh

doi:10.1109/ichve.2018.8642269

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 7 publications

(6 reference statements)

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“…After preliminary analysis, the possibility of breakdown is higher in devices with notching, which indicates that notching will largely affect the electrostatic characteristics of the air gap. However, the mainstream research has focused on the effects of metal electrode roughness, electrode shape, electrode spacing, and atmospheric pressure [12][13][14][15] or different structures of MEMS devices [16][17][18][19][20][21] on the breakdown characteristics, but the breakdown characteristics of MEMS electrodes affected by notching are rarely involved, which leads to the absence of reliable design criteria on electrode spacing and breakdown voltage when designing SOI-based electrostatic driven devices to reference. Considering that more and more MEMS devices are fabricated on SOI substrates and the notching effect is difficult to completely avoid in DRIE for high aspect ratio structures [22], it is necessary to investigate the electrostatic characteristics of MEMS devices affected by notching.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of DRIE notching on field emission enhanced breakdown in SOI based MEMS electrodes

Zhang¹,

Qiao²,

Zhu³

2023

J. Micromech. Microeng.

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Microscale (<5μm) gas breakdown is usually dominated by field emission, which is influenced largely by electrode surface morphology. At present, there is a large number of studies on the breakdown and discharge of different metal electrode geometry and electrode spacing as well as MEMS device structures, but few studies on the breakdown of MEMS electrodes affected by notching, which will greatly change the electrode surface morphology but is difficult to completely avoid in DRIE process based on SOI wafer. In response to this situation, this paper conducted breakdown tests and field emission tests on MEMS samples with and without notching. It was found that samples with notching could withstand more breakdowns of about 6-13 times before the formation of internal resistance, increased by 200%-300% compared with samples without notching, and have a lower breakdown voltage of about 210V, 16% lower than that of samples without notching. In addition, it was also found that for the samples with notching, the field enhancement factor gradually decreases with the increase of the number of breakdown events. When the field enhancement factor decreases to about 100, the subsequent breakdown is highly likely to cause the sample to form electrical connection, thus completely damaging the sample. Above conclusions have certain reference value for designing the actuation voltage of MEMS devices based on SOI wafers.

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