A physical model to describe the distribution of adhesion strength in MEMS, or why one MEMS device sticks and another ‘identical’ one does not

In this paper a model is presented that describes the distribution of adhesion values typically experimentally observed for different MEMS devices that have been fabricated in the same way. This spread is attributed to the fact that different devices differ in the details of their surface roughness, even if these surface roughnesses are modeled...

In-Plane Displacement Detection With Picometer Accuracy on a Conventional Microscope

In this paper, we present a new method for detecting in-plane displacements in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) with an unprecedented sub-ångström accuracy. We use a curve-fitting method that is commonly employed in spectroscopy to find peak positions in a spectrum. We fit a function to the intensity profile of the image of a silicon beam...