Guest Author: Jérôme Juillard, Ph.D., Professor, CentraleSupélec (Paris-Saclay University)
Every year, I teach different aspects of sensors and MEMS design to about a hundred students. The pupils range from first year to last year students at CentraleSupélec and the M2 Nanoscience program at Paris-Saclay University, where I am a professor.
For more than a year, since I created some new courses at CentraleSupélec (and thanks to the support of Coventor), I have completely revisited the way that I teach sensors and MEMS design. I now substantially rely on Coventor’s MEMS+® product, which has many advantages from a pedagogical point of view:
The use of MEMS+ for illustrating teaching concepts has been particularly valuable this semester, during which all of my teaching had to be done remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic and where I had neither a white board worthy of the name, nor a stand where I could mimic the pitch and roll (or yaw) of a gyroscope. Using MEMS+ in my lectures, and putting it in the hands of the students during the tutorials and projects that followed, made it possible to establish a pedagogical continuity, which was crucial in this difficult context.
Objective: to propose the most suitable simulation model of a 3-axis accelerometer, with data from a teardown (MEMS Journal) and a datasheet of the accelerometer as starting points for the design.
Objective: to optimize a system of mechanical levers and electrostatic actuators to tune the frequency of a resonator over the widest possible range, under constraints of a maximum occupied surface and maximum applied voltage.
Jérôme Juillard is a Professor within the GEEPS laboratory at CentraleSupélec, a French engineering program. He specializes in MEMS research, with an interest in resonant MEMS devices. His current research interests include the study of coupled MEMS oscillators for sensing applications and the operation of MEMS oscillators in the nonlinear regime.