MEMS components by their very nature have different and unique failure mechanisms than their macroscopic counterparts. This paper discusses failure mechanisms observed in various MEMS components and technologies. MEMS devices fabricated using bulk and surface micromachining process technologies are emphasized.

Long life has been billed as a key advantage of LEDs, but understanding and communicating how LED products fail and how long they last can be challenging. While LED-based products hold the potential to achieve lifetimes that meet or exceed their traditional counterparts, manufacturer claims can be misconstrued by users who do not fully understand LED product failure mechanisms or the difference...

A new novel test method, associated analysis, and experimental procedures are developed to investigate the toughness of the facesheet-to-core interface of a sandwich material at cryogenic temperatures. The test method is designed to simulate the failure mode associated with facesheet debonding from high levels of gas pressure in the sandwich core. The effects of specimen orientation are conside...

The structure signature of a system made up of n components having continuous and i.i.d. lifetimes was defined in the eighties by Samaniego as the n-tuple whose k-th coordinate is the probability that the k-th component failure causes the system to fail. More recently, a bivariate version of this concept was considered as follows. The joint structure signature of a pair of systems built on a co...

Preventive maintenance is required to keep critical systems available at reasonable costs. Instead of applying the traditional experience-based approach of statistical analysis of failure data, the present paper proposes to adopt a predictive maintenance policy that relies on detailed knowledge of the physical failure mechanisms. A structured scheme for this approach is presented. Then three ca...

We describe a simulator for modeling complex control dynamics in optical line systems involving the interaction of multiple transmission, control, and monitoring elements in response to channel changes, component failure, and recovery events.

Power electronic devices are susceptible to catastrophic failures when they are exposed to energetic particles; the most serious failure mechanism is single event burnout (SEB). SEB is a widely recognized problem for space applications, but it also may affect devices in terrestrial applications. This phenomenon has been studied in detail for power MOSFETs, but much less is known about the mecha...

This dissertation contains contributions to the management of optical transport networks. The focus is on traffic modeling, analysis of failure mechanism, and the development of a novel semi-automatic network management system. The developed service oriented traffic models serve as input parameters for the network management system and include the special routing of the analyzed services. An ev...

Wafer-level testing of surface-micromachined sensors provides ncw challenges to the test community. Currently, there is no method available for performing direct measurements to assess faulty micromechanical structures. Most commercial methods use electrical measurements to deduce the physical source of failures in the micromechanical structure. As a result, the process of identifyang various f...

Traditionally the statistical or more specifically probabilistic methods form the basic framework for assessing the reliability characteristics of the components. However the recent trend for predicting the reliability or life of the component involves application of physics-offailure methods. This rather new approach is finding wider application as it is based on basic fundamentals of science ...