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The use of Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) for measuring accelerations, pressure, gyroscopic yaw rate and humidity in engine controls, inflatable restraint, braking, stability and other safety critical vehicle systems is increasing. Their use in these safety critical systems in high stress automotive environments makes ensuring their reliability and durability essential tasks, especially as the Vehicle System Functional Safety requirements of ISO-26262 are being implemented across the industry. A Design for Reliability (DfR) approach that applies Physics of Failure methods to evaluate and eliminate or mitigate susceptibilities to failure modes of a device during the design of a product is the most effective and efficient way to achieve Functional Safety levels of reliability-durability. MEMS packages exhibit several failure modes that can be predicted as a device is designed using modern Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) software tools.