An Environment for Design and Modeling of Electro- Mechanical Micro-systems

This paper presents a comprehensive CAD environment for MEMS/MST design. The design flow includes MEMS mechanical schematic entry, parameterized cell layout generation, LVS style error checking, lumped parameter macro-model generation, and system level modeling of the micro-system. The design environment also provides error checking between different design views. The implemented macromodel extraction technique can be used for micro-systems that can be represented as multi-component massspring-dashpot structures. Examples include accelerometers, gyros, and other structures that have rigid masses and compliant springs. A mass-produced capacitive MEMS accelerometer (Analog Devices, Inc.'s ADXL76), is employed as an illustrative example of this procedure. The accuracy of the developed method is also verified by comparing macro-model results for several other MEMS structures to the results of full 3-D physics simulations. Good accuracy is demonstrated in both spatialdomain and frequency-domain dynamic behavior of the models.