Over the last few years, considerable effort has gone into the study of the failure mechanisms and reliability of MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS). MEMS performance and reliability are affected by many parameters, such as the complex physical interactions between thermo-mechanical deformation, current flow, high power actuation and contact heating. In particular, temperature is a key issue for the design of a low loss and reliable MEMS. In order to improve device reliability it is essential to understand the thermal behaviours of RF-MEMS under standard or harsh current conditions. In this work, we present a new approach to investigate the failure mechanism of MEMS. An original set-up has been developed to localise and measure the heat loss of MEMS during actuation. Thermal characterization has been performed using infrared thermography to investigate the thermal sensitivity of MEMS. A brand new infrared bench was developed for temperature distribution measurement. An infrared camera, operating in the 1,5 - 5 µm bandwidth, was coupled to a new specific optic to reach an enhanced spatial resolution better than 2 µm/pixel. This work presents several results obtained on different advanced RF-MEMS including RF-MEMS switches where failure mechanism had been diagnosed.
