A novel laterally-driven inertial micro-switch with two L-shaped elastic cantilever beams as the movable electrode, which is attached to the proof mass, is proposed in this paper. The advantage of this design is that the contact time of the inertial micro-switch can be prolonged. Meanwhile, the micro-switch can withstand a higher shock than the traditional designs whose cantilever beams are attached to the fixed electrode. The designed inertial micro-switch was simulated and optimized with ANSYS software and fabricated on a quartz substrate by surface micromachining technology. The simulated result demonstrates that the threshold acceleration (a(ths)) under stable switch-on state is about 288 g and the contact time is about 198 mu s when the pulse width of acceleration loads is 1 ms. At the same time, it indicates that the threshold acceleration, the response time and the contact time of designed micro-switch all increase with the pulse width of acceleration loads. The simulation of impact process in non-sensitive direction shows that the introduced constraint sleeve structure in the novel inertial micro-switch can lower the off axis sensitivity. The fabricated micro-switch prototype has been tested by a standard dropping hammer system under shock accelerations with various amplitudes and pulse widths. The experimental measurements show that the contact time is about 150 mu s when the threshold acceleration is about 288 g. It also indicates that the response time and the contact time both increase with the pulse width, which is consistent with the simulation ones. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.