One of the highlight events every year on the MEMS calendar is the IEEE International Conference on MEMS. This is a prestigious gathering that attracts the true thought leaders in MEMS – from both the commercial and academic sides of our industry. The IEEE describes it, quite rightly, as the “flagship annual event of the MEMS community.”
The event organizers often hold the conference in some pretty exotic places – like Cancun, Mexico; Sorrento, Italy; and Istanbul, Turkey. While those are great destinations, it can be hard for some people to justify the travel to their bosses.
That’s why we’re pleased that the 2014 edition of the IEEE MEMS Conference, the 27th in its history, is being held in San Francisco, making it very convenient for a very large concentration of MEMS-oriented professionals to attend. The conference will be held January 26-30 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown San Francisco.
As usual, there is a great lineup of technical papers and plenary sessions scheduled. The conference always has a very international flavor and this year will be no different with plenary speakers coming from Japan and Switzerland, as well as the US. In all, more than 200 papers will be presented during the week, covering topics such as:
Coventor will be attending the event and we are expecting an excellent turnout. It’s an important venue for us to showcase our latest products used in the design of MEMS devices and manufacturing processes. In fact, for anyone who hasn’t taken a close look at Coventor for a little while, you may surprised at the breadth of what we have to offer.
Most people in the MEMS industry are familiar with our core CoventorWare product which is used for detailed device design and has been in production for more than a dozen years. It’s an integrated suite of design and simulation software that has the accuracy, capacity, and speed to address real-world MEMS designs. The suite has many MEMS-specific features for modeling and simulating a wide range of MEMS devices.
Over the past few years, we have broadened our offering in two ways. First, through a more system-level oriented tool, called MEMS+, which leverages our expertise in MEMS design but also allows traditional IC designs to be integrated with MEMS-based systems. The MEMS+ suite enables MEMS and IC designers to rapidly explore and optimize designs in parallel in the MathWorks MATLAB® and Cadence Virtuoso® environments. The latest release, Version 4.0, features a new capability to export models in Verilog-A format and a full 64-bit implementation that allows more accurate modeling of complex MEMS sensors and actuators.
We also address the challenges of MEMS process development, with our tool SEMulator3D. Based on highly efficient physics-driven voxel modeling technology, it has a unique ability to model complete process flows for MEMS, eliminating costly build-and-test iterations and improving learning cycles. It gives developers a better understanding of fabrication details for successful device manufacturing through our unique ‘virtual fabrication’ approach. In fact, we have just published an informative white paper on how SEMulator3D can be used for MEMS process development.
We’ll have our technical experts on hand to answer questions and talk about how all our tools are being used in the industry today.
Stop by and see us – Coventor will be in booth #26
We look forward to seeing all of our friends in the MEMS industry at this year’s event.
Figure 1: A virtual model of a GAA FET showing residual SiGe after the channel release step. Process engineers have to make a trade-off between silicon loss and residual SiGe.(b) Variation in residual SiGe as a function of the channel width and etch lateral ratio. The higher the channel width, the higher the lateral ratio needed to etch away all the SiGe. Channel widths are shown as delta values from the nominal value of 30 nm.