CARAMEL: Contamination And Reliability Analysis of MicroElectromechanical Layout

Author

Kolpekwar, Abhijeet ; Jiang, Tao ; Blanton, R. D Shawn

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Volume

8

Issue

3

fYear

1999

fDate

9/1/1999 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

309

Lastpage

318

Abstract

CARAMEL (Contamination And Reliability Analysis of MicroElectromechanical Layout) is a CAD tool for MEMS fault model generation. It is based on the integrated circuit contamination analysis tool CODEF and is capable of analyzing the impact of contamination particles on the behavior of microelectromechanical systems. CARAMEL´s simulation output indicates that a wide range of defective structures are possible due to the presence of particulate contaminations. Moreover, electromechanical simulations of CARAMEL´s mesh representations of defective layout has revealed that a wide variety of misbehaviors are associated with these defects. Several thousand contamination simulations were performed using CARAMEL on the surface micromachined comb-drive resonator. The results generated by CARAMEL identifies the comb drive as the most defect prone region of the microresonator and the deposition of the first structural layer as the most vulnerable processing step

Keywords

CAD; micromechanical resonators; reliability theory; surface contamination; CAD tool; CARAMEL; MEMS fault model generation; comb-drive resonator; defective layout; electromechanical simulation; microelectromechanical system; microresonator; particulate contamination; reliability analysis; surface micromachining; Atmospheric modeling; Circuit analysis; Circuit faults; Circuit simulation; Design for testability; Fault diagnosis; Integrated circuit reliability; Micromechanical devices; Surface contamination; Testing;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Microelectromechanical Systems, Journal of

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1057-7157

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/84.788635

Filename

788635