Design and analysis of self-repairable MEMS accelerometer

In this paper, a self-repairable MEMS (SRMEMS) accelerometer design is proposed. The accelerometer consists of (n + m) identical modules: n of them serve as the main device, while the remaining in modides act as the redundancy. If any of the working module in the main device is found faulty, the control circuit will replace it with a good redundant module. In this way, the faulty device can be self-repaired through redundancy. The sensitivity loss due to device modularization can be well compensated by different design alternatives. The yield model for MEMS redundancy repair is developed. The simulation results show that the BISR (built-in self-repair) design leads to effective yield increase compared to non-BISR design, especially for a moderate non-BISR yield. By implementing the fault tolerance feature into MEMS devices, the yield as well as the reliability of a MEMS device implemented in a SoC can be improved.