Montreux, Switzerland, 01-03 June 2005 ADVANCED PROCESS EMULATION AND CIRCUIT SIMULATION FOR CO-DESIGN OF MEMS AND CMOS DEVICES

We discuss the co-design of integrated MEMS accelerometer array designed and fabricated onto the input of a CMOS charge amplifier. The focus of this paper is on two parts of the design flow: Firstly, advanced 3D process emulation and secondly, circuit simulation. We use a "voxel" (volumetric pixel) based process emulation tool that takes 2D masks and a description of the fabrication process, to build highly detailed, realisticlooking virtual prototypes. Standard MEMS fabrication process steps have been implemented such as deposition and etch steps, accurately capturing realistic process effects. In addition to the MEMS processes, CMOS process specific functions have been developed. Within a network simulator behavioral models of MEMS and IC elements were created and coupled together to model mechanical and electrical interactions. While the MEMS accelerometers have been designed using a library of MEMS components, for the electronic part a compatible macro-model has been developed based on PSpice.