CARAMEL: Contamination And Reliability Analysis of MicroElectromechanical Layout

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.