New MEMS Design Ecosystem Evolving to Meet Changing Market Demands
August 3, 2012
IBM, Coventor present 22nm virtual fabrication success at SISPAD
September 9, 2013
A new and very comprehensive book on MEMS design is now available, and we are proud to point out that a couple of Coventor MEMS experts have provided the first chapter.
This practical handbook fills a gap in the literature available on advanced micro and nanosystems. It addresses the three most important approaches of system-level modeling:
1) physical modeling with lumped elements and Kirchhoffian networks
2) modal modeling to accurately describe the mechanical domain
3) mathematical modeling employing, for example, model-order reduction methods.
Editors and authors from industry and research discuss the physical and mathematical underpinnings and methods of MEMS modeling in a clearly understandable and sufficiently detailed manner. Tailored to practitioners and engineers, authors present the advantages and pitfalls of each method — and how to avoid the latter – so readers can choose the method most suitable for their specific application requirements.
The industry section features contributions from a variety of companies with the first chapter authored by Coventor’s Gunar Lorenz and Gerold Schröpfer, which describes a MEMS system design methodology that enables MEMS and IC engineers to design and simulate in the same environment. Implemented in Coventor’s MEMS+® design platform, this methodology has substantial advantages over the traditional approach of transferring handcrafted or reduced-order behavioral models from the MEMS engineers to the IC engineers.
First, the behavioral models of the MEMS device are sufficiently sophisticated to fully represent the MEMS behavior, capturing, for example, cross-coupling between the mechanical degrees of freedom. Second, the 3-D geometrical and behavioral models, as well as associated layout cells, are fully parameterized both with respect to manufacturing-dependent variations and geometric attributes of the design, which enables design and yield optimization studies in the EDA environment. And third, the automatic hand-off between the MEMS and IC design environments eliminates inevitable human errors that arise in any manual hand-off process.
In addition to showcasing the latest advancements in the MEMS development ecosystem including high order finite elements, this chapter by way example applies the new methodology to a DLP MEMS mirror array with underlying electronics based on SRAM cells.
More information about the book including the complete table of contents is available on Amazon.com here
![Fig. 2. Silicon spin qubit centered in the dotted circle, control and readout signals (M, P, R, T, and Q) are shown in the inset. Simplified schematics of the quantum point contact and corollary circuits are shown. The voltage source is implemented as a digital-to-analog converter at room temperature. (Taken from [6])](https://www.coventor.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Fig.-2.-Silicon-spin-qubit-centered-in-the-dotted-circle-control-and-readout.png)
![Figure 2: Schematic view of standard CMOS including an electro-mechanical switch monolithically integrated into BEOL [2]. Courtesy: University of California, Berkeley](https://www.coventor.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Figure-2-April-2022-MEMS-Blog-for-Coventor-website.png)
