By Gerold Schröpfer

The 17th edition of the Symposium on Design, Test, Integration & Packaging of MEMS and MOEMS (DTIP 2015) took place this year in Montpellier, Southern France, on April 28-30. This conference brings together participants interested in MEMS fabrication with those interested in design tools and methods. While this annual event is always located in Southern Europe, it attracts attendees from both industry and academia from around the world.

It was my pleasure to chair a session titled Co-design for MEMS-based Smart Systems. In recent years, Coventor has made several crucial advancements, now embodied in MEMS+®, to bridge the gap between MEMS device design and system-level simulation. A number of MEMS+ users presented co-simulation results for systems that included inertial sensors, resonators, varactors and micromirrors. It was impressive and gratifying to see their achievements and hear their enthusiasm.

• Guilherme Brondani Torri of imec presented the co-design of a MEMS-CMOS autonomous switched oscillator. He investigated how the dynamic response is affected by the operating point and environmental parameters. The co-simulation of MEMS and circuitry made it possible to identify important issues related to the stability of the proposed oscillator. [1]
• Gaelle Lissorgues of ESSIE talked about a complete system design for an RF tunable agile filter. The parametric MEMS+ models for MEMS varactors and switches allowed optimizing the design with respect to manufacturing variations. Automated transfer of the MEMS+ model into Verilog-A allows for system-level simulation in ADS including RF performance estimation.[2]
• Alessandro Sanginario of IIT Torino presented a MEMS+ based methodology for MEMS-IC-package co-design. The methodology takes into account the effects of thermally-induced stress on the package on inertial sensor transient behavior. He stated that, being an electronic designer, “it’s fantastic” to have a MEMS-package model in your familiar simulation language. [3, 4]
• Fabio Cenni of ST Micro discussed a new extension to SystemC for MEMS system analysis, named SystemC-AMS/MDVP (Analog/Mixed Signal/Multi-Domain Virtual Prototyping) . This allows co-simulating not only MEMS with electronic hardware, but also with control software. The approach supports different levels of abstraction which allows balancing accuracy and simulation time. Fabio’s presentation was accompanied by a poster, written by Benoit Vernay of Coventor, demonstrating a prototype for automated extraction of a SystemC-AMS reduced-order models from MEMS+. [5, 6, 7]

Finally, my personal favorite was an invited presentation by Johannes Eisenmenger of Carl Zeiss. From a system-integrator point of view, he discussed the opportunities and challenges for EDA tools in developing optical systems. Optimizing such systems with suitable behavioral models is an essential step toward developing products for which new MEMS and other components need to be developed in parallel and their individual specifications depend on mutual interactions and environmental influences. One prominent example is the MEMS mirror matrix, FlexRay, employed in ASML’s 193nm UV lithography equipment for advanced CMOS. [8]

I want to warmly thank our customers for sharing their work with the MEMS system community.

References:
Proceedings of International Conference on Design, Test, Integration and Packaging of MEMS and MOEMS (DTIP), Montpellier, France, 27-30 April 2015
[1] Guilherme BRONDANI TORRI (imec / KU Leuven – Belgium), Jan BIENSTMAN, Xavier ROTTENBERG, Harrie TILMANS (imec) ea, Co-Design of a MEMS-CMOS Autonomous Switched Oscillator
[2] Gaelle LISSORGUES (ESIEE Paris – France), Pierre NICOLE (THALES Systèmes Aéroportés – France), Julien PAGAZANI (ESIEE – France) ea, A RF tunable Agile Filter: from component to system design
[3] Alessandro SANGINARIO (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia – Italy), Sarah ZERBINI (STMicroelectronics – Italy), ea, New design methodology for MEMS-electronic-package co-design and validation for inertial sensor systems
[4] Michelangelo GROSSO (ST-POLITO – Italy), Giuliana GANGEMI, Salvatore RINAUDO (STMicroelectronics – Italy) ea, Enabling Smart System Design with the SMAC Platform
[5] Olivier GUILLAUME, Fabio CENNI (STMicroelectronics – France) ea.,SystemC-AMS/MDVP-based modeling for the virtual prototyping of MEMS applications
[6] Fabio CENNI STMicroelectronics – France) ea, Generation of user-defined input stimuli for virtual prototyping of MEMS sensors applications
[7] Benoit VERNAY, Arnaud KRUST (Coventor – France), ea, SystemC-AMS Simulation of a Biaxial Accelerometer based on MEMS Model Order Reduction
[8] Johannes Eisenmenger, Opportunities and challenges of Electronic Design Automation of MEMS-ASIC Systems – A system integrator’s perspective (INVITED)