Effects of Sustained Exposure to Temperature and Humidity on the Reliability and Performance of MEMS Microphone

MEMS microphones are extensively used in many applications that require reliability, small size, and high sound quality. For harsh environment reliability data MEMS microphones need to be monitored under conditions mimicking their areas of applications. MEMS microphones have an opening/sound port in order to interact with the environment, therefore cannot be sealed completely since the sensing mechanism requires interaction between sound waves and the sensing element. Little to no information exists on reliability data for MEMS microphones under low/high temperature operating life and temperature humidity bias condition. Our work is primarily focused on providing harsh environmental reliability data which can be useful to MEMS designers and engineers. In this paper the test vehicles with MEMS Microphones have been tested under three different harsh environmental conditions: high temperature operating life (HTOL) at 125°C at 3.3V, low temperature storage (LTS) at −35°C and temperature humidity 85°C/85%RH at 3.3V. The main motive of this study is to document the incremental shift and degradation in output parameters namely distortion, frequency response, power supply rejection capability of IC, frequency vs pressure characteristics and analog output voltage of the MEMS microphone. The survivability of MEMS microphone, ADMP401, has been demonstrated as a function of change in the output parameters. Failure analysis has been conducted on the microphone samples to study failure modes and sites using analytical methods such as SEM, EDS and X-ray.