Interfacial adhesion between electrical contacts determined by surface quality

Micro-Electromechanical-Relay (MER) has widely achieved application in the field of engineering thanks to the excellent features and ever-growing interest in microelectronic products. However, the adhesion phenomenon between gold-sputtered contact pairs in MER usually brings about operating failure of normally closed contacts limiting the reliability level of MER. In this paper, various contact combinations between electrical contact pairs are assembled to simulate real contact conditions, and associated failure type is built by taking advantage of mechanical adhesion theory to reveal failure mechanism about cold adhesion. It is found that the adhesion force is correlated closely with the surface roughness of contact pairs. The specific contact combination is a significant effective strategy to reduce the adhesion failure between electrical contacts.