Huang Qing'an

A hybrid model for the charging process of the amorphous SiO2 film in radio frequency microelectromechanical system capacitive switches

Charging is one of the most important reliability issues in radio frequency microelectro- mechanical systems (RF MEMS) capacitive switches since it makes the actuation voltage unstable. This paper proposes a hybrid model to describe the transient dielectric charging and discharging process in the defect-rich amorphous SiO2 RF MEMS capacitive switches and verifies experimentally. The hybrid model contains two parts according to two different charging mechanisms of the amorphous SiO2, which are the polarisation and charge injection. The models for polarisation and for charge injection are established, respectively. Analysis and experimental results show that polarisation is always effective, while the charge injection has a threshold electric field to the amorphous SiO2 film. Under different control voltage conditions, the hybrid model can accurately describe the experimental data.

Numerical study on photoresist etching processes based on a cellular automata model

For the three-dimensional (3-D) numerical study of photoresist etching processes, the 2-D dynamic cellular automata (CA) model has been successfully extended to a 3-D dynamic CA model. Only the boundary cells will be processed in the 3-D dynamic CA model and the structure of “if-else” description in the simulation program is avoided to speed up the simulation. The 3-D dynamic CA model has found to be stable, fast and accurate for the numerical study of photoresist etching processes. The exposure simulation, post-exposure bake (PEB) simulation and etching simulation are integrated together to further investigate the performances of the CA model. Simulation results have been compared with the available experimental results and the simulations show good agreement with the available experiments.