An Overview of Reliability and Failure Mode Analysis of Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS)

The reliability issues concerning on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) have steadily developed in recent years. One of the processes to understand MEMS reliability is to know the failure modes of these microdevices. In this chapter, we seek to report on both well known and unknown failure modes of MEMS. Most of the failure patterns are the same in nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS), because NEMS followed a developmental path similar to that of MEMS in functional design, materials, and fabrication. Therefore, the existing results of MEMS failure modes can be used as a reference to nanoscale system reliability research. The failure modes discussed in this chapter contain stiction, wear, fracture, crystallographic defect, creep, degradation of dielectrics, environmentally induced failure, electric related failure, parasitic capacitance, dampening effects, delamination, and packaging.