Towards on-line testing of MEMS using electro-thermal excitation

This paper presents an electro-thermal on-line testing procedure applied to a MEMS magnetometer. The basic idea consists in: (i) using electro-thermal excitation to superimpose thermal variations to the normal operating mode; and (ii) processing the sensor output to extract the thermally-induced signal. In this work, we investigate the possibility of using a modulation of the excitation signal to produce a low-frequency thermally-based signal at the output of the Wheatstone bridge. Investigations using high-level simulations are conducted to determine appropriate test stimulus and suitable system architecture.