Reliability assessment by virtual prototyping of MEMS tunable fabry-perot optical cavity

Ilian

et al. 2007

Sensors

Quantitative Accelerated Life Testing (QALT) is a solution for assessing the reliability of Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS). A procedure for QALT is shown in this paper and an attempt to assess the reliability level for a batch of MEMS accelerometers is reported. The testing plan is application-driven and contains combined tests: thermal (high temperature) and mechanical stress. Two variants of mechanical stress are used: vibration (at a fixed frequency) and tilting. Original equipment for testing at tilting and high temperature is used. Tilting is appropriate as application-driven stress, because the tilt movement is a natural environment for devices used for automotive and aerospace applications. Also, tilting is used by MEMS accelerometers for anti-theft systems. The test results demonstrated the excellent reliability of the studied devices, the failure rate in the “worst case” being smaller than 10-7h-1.

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantitative Accelerated Life Testing of MEMS Accelerometers

Ilian

et al. 2007

Sensors

“…There are evidences that the fatigue fracture is accelerated by the high temperature, especially if humidity is present at the chip level, diffusing from outside through the plastic package [8]. The fatigue damage of a movable membrane is accumulated over mechanical fatigue cycles to failure, produced by vibration and enhanced by high temperature [9,10].…”

Section: Commentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reliability accelerated tests for microsystems

Proceedings of the 2011 34th International Spring Seminar on Electronics Technology (ISSE)

Ilian

2011

Accelerated testing is the current option in reliability. The paper introduces the main types of reliability accelerated tests used for microsystems: quantitative and qualitative ones, respectively. Then, a case study is shown, for a MEMS inertial sensor, which is a 3-Axis linear accelerometer. A combination of quantitative and qualitative tests was used, which allowed to estimate, by using "the worst case" approach, a value for the failure rate of the batch of devices (<10 -7 h -1 ), showing the high reliability of the studied devices.

“…A tuneable Fabry-Perot cavity for optical applications (optical filters, modulators, sensors, etc), which is a resonant micro-cavity composed by two flat, parallel, high quality mirrors, separated by a variable gap was analysed [3]. The main dimensions of the device are: central square of the membrane: 100X100 m; width of the suspension arms: 20 m; membrane's thickness: 0.51 m; gap (distance between the upper face of the fixed electrode and the bottom face of the membrane): 1.75 m.…”

Section: Reliability Prediction For Memsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The method is particularly useful for the reliability analysis made by virtual prototyping [3]. The proposed method could be used for predicting the reliability of some basic elements of MEMS devices.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fuzzy-Logic Reliability Predictions in Microtechnologies

Tibeică

International Conference on Computational Intelligence for Modelling, Control and Automation and International Conference on In

et al.

Self Cite

A method for reliability prediction, called SYRP (SYnergetic Reliability Prediction), is presented, based on a combined fuzzy-logic & physics-of-failure approach. SYRP is used for a semiconductor device (thermal sensors) and the estimations, compared with experimental results, prove to be accurate enough. Also, the problems to be solved for using this method for MEMS are presented. The specific case of a MEMS Fabry-Perot interferometer is analyzed and the failure rate estimations are discussed. The method seems to be particularly useful for the reliability analysis made by virtual prototyping.