Coventor’s Director of European Operations Gerold Schröpfer was recently interviewed on the topic of energy harvesting for a newsletter produced by the European Metrology Research Programme.

What does Coventor do?
Coventor develops and supplies software tools that can be used for the design of micro electromechanical systems (MEMS) and the modelling of semiconductor and MEMS manufacturing processes. The modelling of MEMS energy harvesters is a small but growing area of our business.

Our products enable the co-design and co-simulation of a harvesting device and a conditioning circuit together. It allows users to play around with the both the harvester design parameters and circuit parameters in order to optimise device performance before committing to time-consuming and costly build-and-test cycles. The design can also be checked for high stress areas that may lead to breakage when the device is overloaded.

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By Mike Jamiolkowski, CEO, Coventor, Inc.
(as appeared in the July 2012 e-newsletter: Assembling the Future)

The MEMS market is exploding as smart phones, tablets, games and other mobile devices swallow billions of components. Motion processing and location sensing technologies are central to the functionality of today’s handheld products that most of us find indispensable. Indeed, the merging of sensing with computing power and communications is transforming the MEMS market. But, if it is to meet consumer demand for the fastest growing products, the MEMS industry will need to see the design ecosystem supporting it evolve. read more…

There’s little doubt that the MEMS ecosystem is changing quickly as these devices become ubiquitous, especially in consumer products. The cost and time pressures involved in developing cell phones, games, tablets and other high-growth and emerging MEMS-enabled products are re-shaping the traditional landscape of the MEMS business.

Pure play foundries like TSMC are transforming the MEMS landscape

The most recent report from market research firm IHS on the MEMS manufacturing industry underscores the pace and significance of this evolution. The report counts a dozen pure-play foundries now offering MEMS manufacturing services, a dramatic difference than a decade ago when MEMS manufacturing was done almost entirely in-house at captive MEMS suppliers.

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Stephen Breit, V.P. Engineering, Coventor, Inc.
June, 2012

Easier integration through standards
In a previous post, I discussed the challenges of MEMS integration and primarily looked at design methodology improvements that could help address the issues engineers face. But there is also the issue of how to standardize the process of designing – and more importantly, integrating – the various elements of a MEMS-based system. read more…