Accelerated life time estimation of electrostatic microactuators

There is an absolute need of accelerated life time measurement for MEMS actuators. In this paper, a simple method is proposed. It relies on very low frequency electrical detection of the failures and on high voltage testing, since a relationship between mean time before failure and driving voltage is proved. A time gain factor of 20 is reached with test structures used in real applications. An experimental set-up is described and results obtained with electrostatic microactuators with parallel capacitances made using deep RIE etching on SOI wafers are shown.