Abstract
This paper presents a novel design of mechanical latching shock stops (latching stops) for in-plane shock protection of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). With three shock protection modes, latching stops are capable of limiting the displacement of silicon suspensions in a compliant manner with efficient energy dissipation. The energy dissipation and the impact force between suspensions and shock stops were analyzed by numerical simulation. The analysis results indicate that latching stops, under a half-sine shock impulse [3000 g (1 g ≈ 9.8 m/s2), 0.15 ms], reduce more than two-third of the impact force compared with hard stops, and additionally, dissipate 33.23% of the total mechanical energy during the latching process. Test specimens of both latching stops and conventional hard stops were developed for comparison. The experimental results demonstrate that test specimens of latching stops achieve more than double the robustness compared with those of hard stops. This new shock protection approach decouples the reliability design from the device design. Moreover, latching stops are compatible with wafer-level MEMS batch fabrication without the requirement of additional processes or materials.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the technical staffs in National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Micro/Nano Fabrication, Beijing, China, for their support on the fabrication of test specimens.
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Xu, K., Zhang, W. & Hao, Y. Mechanical latching stops for reliability improvement of MEMS in shock environments. Microsyst Technol 24, 3399–3407 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00542-018-3714-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00542-018-3714-8