CARAMEL: Contamination and reliability analysis of MicroElectromechanical layout

CARAMEL (Contamination And Reliability Analysis of MicroElectromechanical L ayout) is a CAD tool for MEMS fault model generation. It is based on the in tegrated circuit contamination analysis tool CODEF [1] and is capable of an alyzing the impact of contamination particles on the behavior of microelect romechanical systems. CARAMEL's simulation output indicates that a wide ran ge of defective structures are possible due to the presence of particulate contaminations. Moreover, electromechanical simulations of CARAMEL's mesh r epresentations of defective layout has revealed that a wide variety of misb ehaviors 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 o f the first structural layer as the most vulnerable processing step.