The advent of MEMS in space

An overview of the MEMS activity at the French Space Agency (CNES) is presented. At present, MEMS are in the introduction phase and failure analysis and quality assurance (FA/QA) activities are underway for a large variety of MEMS technologies. This paper presents the CNES roadmap and methodology developed to assess the reliability of MEMS for space applications. The presented approach focuses, in particular, on the use of advanced analytical models, test vehicles, process control monitoring test structures and simulation tools to control and validate the quality of a technology. It also discusses the FA know-how and associated techniques acquired by CNES to observe, characterize, prepare and test in controlled environment MEMS processes. Finally, case studies illustrating the CNES MEMS FA/QA strategy are presented.