System-Level Synthesis

Microelectromechanical Systems such as resonators, accelerometers, gyroscopes, IR sensors, RF filters, electrothermal converters and force sensors can be composed out of beam springs, plate masses, dampers, and electromechanical comb sensors and actuators. MEMS design involves iteratively designing each of these submodules and the entire transducer including the electronics, to meet given design specifications. System-level synthesis helps automate much of this design problem for a fixed MEMS transducer topology. First, geometric layout design variables are identified to describe the topology. Next, functional constraints that map these variables to engineering performance specifications are obtained by static and dynamic mechanical as well as electrostatic analysis. Then, the variables and constraints are used to formulate a mixed-integer non-linear optimization problem, which is solved to synthesize the transducer layout from high-level engineering specifications. A variety of objective functions can be used to automate the exploration of the entire design space given specific user-specified engineering constraints, allowing the designer to understand the complex design trade-offs inherent to the design problem.

[1]  Tamal Mukherjee.  CAD for integrated MEMS design , 2000, Design, Test, Integration, and Packaging of MEMS/MOEMS.

[2]  N. C. MacDonald,et al.  Optimal shape design of an electrostatic comb drive in microelectromechanical systems , 1998 .

[3]  Gang Zhang,et al.  A post-CMOS micromachined lateral accelerometer , 2002 .

[4]  S. T. Picraux,et al.  The broad sweep of integrated microsystems , 1998 .

[5]  Hui Li,et al.  Genetic Algorithms in MEMS Synthesis , 1998, Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS).

[6]  Jacob K. White,et al.  Emerging simulation approaches for micromachined devices , 2000, IEEE Trans. Comput. Aided Des. Integr. Circuits Syst..

[7]  L. Warne,et al.  Electrophysics of micromechanical comb actuators , 1995 .

[8]  A. Pisano,et al.  Modeling and optimal design of piezoelectric cantilever microactuators , 1997 .

[9]  G.K. Fedder,et al.  Automated optimal synthesis of microaccelerometers , 1999, Technical Digest. IEEE International MEMS 99 Conference. Twelfth IEEE International Conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (Cat. No.99CH36291).

[10]  E. Antonsson,et al.  Emergent faces in crystal etching , 1994 .

[11]  Rob A. Rutenbar,et al.  Computer-aided design of analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits , 2000, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[12]  Dan Haronian.  Maximizing microelectromechanical sensor and actuator sensitivity by optimizing geometry , 1995 .

[13]  Tamal Mukherjee,et al.  Optimization-based synthesis of microresonators , 1998 .

[14]  Francis E. H. Tay,et al.  Global optimization and design for microelectromechanical systems devices based on simulated annealing , 2002 .

[15]  H. Tilmans.  Equivalent circuit representation of electromechanical transducers: I. Lumped-parameter systems , 1996 .

[16]  P. Gill,et al.  Fortran package for nonlinear programming. User's Guide for NPSOL (Version 4. 0) , 1986 .

[17]  Bernhard E. Boser,et al.  A micromachined fully differential lateral accelerometer , 1996, Proceedings of Custom Integrated Circuits Conference.

[18]  William C. Tang,et al.  Electrostatic-comb drive of lateral polysilicon resonators , 1990 .

[19]  Satyandra K. Gupta,et al.  An extraction-based verification methodology for MEMS , 2002 .

[20]  Zhenjun Zhu,et al.  Anisotropic Crystalline Etching Simulation Using a Continuous Cellular Automata Algorithm , 1998, Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS).

[21]  G. K. Ananthasuresh,et al.  A novel topology design scheme for the multi-physics problems of electro-thermally actuated compliant micromechanisms , 2002 .