Silicon-compatible micromachining provides a low cost monolithic solution for the integration of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). In the last years, CMP (the French MultiProject Wafer Service) has made available technological solutions for the fabrication of CMOS-compatible MEMS. Numerous monolithic devices have been fabricated using this service. The inspection of failed devices has allowed the identification of the most typical failure mechanisms and design errors for this type of MEMS. This valuable information, together with a detailed analysis of the fabrication processes, is used in this paper to provide a classification of faults in silicon-compatible MEMS which can later be used for fault simulation and testing.

Besides foundry facilities, Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools are also required to move microsystems from research prototypes to an industrial market. Currently available CAD tools need extensions before they can be used for the automated design of micromachined devices. This paper presents a low cost access to microsystem technology (MST), applied by the CMP service, and based on the use of existing microelectronics production lines, with additional post-processing for microsystem specific 2D and 3D structures, and a global CAD approach for the design and simulation of microsystems applied to currently available commercial CAD tools, e.g. Mentor Framework, in order t o ensure a continuous flow from the design to the manufacturing.

On-line temperature monitoring of safety-critical ICs and systems becomes more and more crucial because of downsizing of integrated circuits and of increased density due to advanced packaging. To prevent erroneous operation, temperature sensors should be placed on the critical spots, the outputs of which should be read by means of boundary scanned architectures or modified boundary scanned architectures in case of on-line monitoring.