Besides one dimensional beam-type MEMS, two dimensional electrically actuated rectangular micro-plates have lots of applications in micro-engineering. However, there exist only a few works devoted to the analysis of such structures in the open literature to date. Therefore, the present work focuses on the dynamic behavior of electrically actuated rectangular micro-plates under mechanical shock. The micro-plate is modeled using the non-linear Kirchhoff plate theory and the shock is assumed to be induced according to the base excitation scheme. The micro-plate motion is simulated through a novel and computationally very efficient reduced order model which accounts for the inherent non-linearity of distributed electrostatic pressure and the geometric non-linearity of von Kármán mid-plane stretching as well as the influences of both in-plane and out-of-plane displacements. The present findings are compared and successfully validated by those obtained through three-dimensional finite element analysis carried out in COMSOL Multiphysics commercial software as well as the available static results in the literature. It is found that the present procedure can remove the long run-time limitation of the finite element method and produce robust results over the whole operation range of the device up to its instability threshold especially for systems subjected to enormous shock accelerations.

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