Lakdawala H., Baidya B., Mukherjee T., Fedder G.K.
Carnegie Mellon University, US
Keywords: 3D canonical representation, automatic meshing, CMOS micromachined structures, finite element analyssis
In this paper, we describe an automatic technique for meshing multilayer CMOS micromachined structure for Finite Element Analysis (FEA) from device layout. The technique is based on a 3D canonical representation of the different CMOS layers an dfeature recognition of plate masses, springs, beams and comb drives within the surface micromachined MEMS device. Manual meshing of devices for FEA is very tedious for multilayers structures as each layer must be separately meshaed and subsequently merged. FE modeling experts tend to use heuristics derived from past experience and knowledge of structural features to improve mesh quality. We present a technique that tries to replicat this appoach by detecting various MEMS features, and then meshing them based on an user-supplied rules file. This approach results in a FDEA mesh that is computationally more efficient than conventional automeshers that have no knowledge of the geometry. The resulting computation time is found to be an order of magnitude faster that uniform meshing, with less than 5% difference in accuracy.
Journal: TechConnect Briefs
Volume: Technical Proceedings of the 1999 International Conference on Modeling and Simulation of Microsystems
Published: April 19, 1999
Pages: 297 - 300
Industry sector: Sensors, MEMS, Electronics
Topic: Modeling & Simulation of Microsystems
ISBN: 0-9666135-4-6