MEMS Component Extraction

Surface micromachined structures are composed of atomic elements like anchors, beams and fingers, which can be further grouped into components like springs, comb drives and plates. Automatic recognition of these elements and components is crucial for a structured design methodology in MEMS (Microelectromechanical system). As MEMS design tends to be layout-centric, design evaluation requires extraction of the atomic elements from the layout. Furthermore, MEMS component extraction reduces the size of the simulation problem, enabling efficient design evaluation. An improved extraction module has been developed for component extraction that generates the netlist of the schematic corresponding to the layout. An ordinary differential equation solver combined with component models can then be used for efficient functional verification of the layout by simulating the extracted netlist. The utility of the extractor is demonstrated for a variety of MEMS devices composed of different types of springs and electrostatic actuators and sensors. Simulation time for the extracted netlist decreased by a factor of 10 when component extraction and component models were used compared to a netlist of only atomic elements.