Solid-based CAPP for surface micromachined MEMS devices

Process planning for a MEMS device is almost always conducted manually by the designer to date. As the structures of MEMS devices become more and more complicated, in order to release the designers from the hard and tedious work and speed up the development of MEMS products, such a situation should be changed. In this study, a solid based CAPP method for surface micromachined MEMS device is presented. With this method, a MEMS device is designed with a traditional CAD system, and its process planning is conducted automatically based on the solid model created. The process features with engineering semantics are extracted first. Then, the process layer model is constructed with each process layer of the model being coincident with the fabrication layer of surface micromachining. Finally, the masks are synthesized and the fabrication process is generated. Furthermore, to guarantee the manufacturability of the designed MEMS device, a systematic evaluation method is proposed. The proposed design and CAPP methods enable designers to concentrate on functional and shape design of MEMS devices. c © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.