Fault Simulation of Surface-micromachined MEMS Accelerometer
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Authors
Karuppannan, Karthikeyan
Xiong, Xingguo
Zhang, Linfeng
Hu, Junling
Issue Date
2009
Type
Article
Language
en_US
Keywords
Engineering , Micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) , Accelerometer , Testing
Alternative Title
Abstract
Surface-micromachined MEMS accelerometers have been used in many applications, such as automobile airbag deployment systems and aerospace inertial navigation. Due to the movable parts involved and their diversity in device structure and working principles, MEMS devices are vulnerable to much more defect sources compared to their VLSI counterparts. Typical defect sources for MEMS devices include point stiction, etch variation, broken-beam, etc. Such defects may greatly lower the fabrication yield and degrade the device reliability. It is important to understand the MEMS failure mechanisms and see how various defects will affect the device behavior. In this paper, point-stiction defect in a surface-micromachined MEMS comb accelerometer is investigated. ANSYS simulation is used to see how the influence of the point-stiction defect on device behavior depends on the locations of the defect. ANSYS model for the defect-free device is developed and simulated. After that, point-stiction defects are injected to simulate the faulty device behavior. Simulation results demonstrate that depending on the location of the defects, the influence on the device behavior may be trivial, parametric or fatal. The fault simulation of MEMS accelerometer is helpful in finding an effective testing strategy for MEMS devices. It may also offer some hints on how to further improve the yield and reliability of MEMS.
Description
© ASEE 2009
Citation
Publisher
ASEE