A MEMS Igniter Design for Fuze Safety & Arming

MEMS have being brought huge changes in many industry areas. For military application, MEMS technologies have a great potential to reduce the mass, cost and power consumption, while improving the safety, reliability and smartness. MEMS is already used in guidance and navigation systems, the pyrotechnical ignition system widely used in missiles, rockets, warheads and similar devices could also efficiently take benefit from MEMS's potential. In this paper, the efforts are put on the design, fabrication and experiment of a MEMS fuze safe igniter, and it's feasibility has been proved. The total area is less than 1 cm(2) to be integrated into a safety and arming device for missile ignition, and the igniter is consisted of one micro igniter and three one-shot electro-thermal switches. It can realize arming, disarming and sterilization functions through the switching of the three switches. It is also introduced in the paper that the working principle of the fuze igniter based on MEMS, the structure designing of the igniter, the ON-OFF micro switch and the OFF-ON micro switch. The theory computation and simulation such as transient analysis, parameter study have been performed by CoventorWare. The fuze igniter is mainly fabricated by the surface MEMS techniques, and the fabrication steps include thermal oxidation, LPCVD, photolithography, RIB, PECVD, plating, and DRIE. The fuze igniter for test is fabricated successfully.