Reliability of Microelectromechanical Systems Devices

Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) reliability issues, apart from traditional failure mechanisms like fatigue, wear, creep, and contamination, often involve many other specific mechanisms which do not damage the system’s function but may degrade the performance of MEMS devices. This chapter focuses on the underlying mechanisms of specific reliability issues, storage long-term drift and thermal drift. The comb finger capacitive micro-accelerometers are selected as the case for this study. The material viscoelasticity of packaging adhesive and thermal effects induced by structure layout are considered so as to explain the physical phenomenon of output change over time and temperature. Each section showcases the corresponding experiments and analysis of reliability.