ENGINEERING CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT IN MICROSYSTEMS

Abstract

Microsystems are a rapidly developing technology that integrates Micro-electro-mechanical systems (commonly known as MEMS) and microfluidics devices with microelectronics and optoelectronics circuits. Due to increasing demand and opportunities from these fields, universities are introducing or have introduced MEMS/Microfluidics courses to their students at undergraduates and graduate levels. By its nature, the field is multidisciplinary and requires various backgrounds when integrating all components of Microsystems as described above. The current challenges in this area are design, fabrication and testing the microsystem devices. This brings various constraints on both the instructors and the students from the point of teaching and learning aspects. Designing a typical microsystem requires the use of modeling and simulation tools from multi energy domains (circuit simulators, multiphysics analysis, 3D modeling, fluidic flows etc). Fabrication methods have recently been evolved from traditional microelectronics fabrication techniques to more complicated micromachining technologies (bulk vs. surface micromachining, LIGA vs. Deep Reactive Ion etching etc). Testing of Microsystems goes beyond traditional electrical testing to the motion analysis of the moving parts on the microsystems. In recent years, the application of microsystems have also been moving away from traditional telecommunication and entering into new areas like health care, energy, environment, automobile and biotechnology. This makes the teaching of microsystem technologies more challenging to fulfill the needs of students entering in Microsystems from existing disciplines (electrical, mechanical, physics, etc.) with limited background on all parts of microsystems. In addition to the multidisciplinary nature of Microsystems, limited resources (small number of design platforms versus large number of students), absence of supportive funding vs. high cost of prototyping, limited time frame vs. long fabrication periods, restrictive opportunities for students to have hands-on design experience make it difficult to offer such courses at graduate and undergraduate levels. In this paper, we discuss developing a new Microsystems course curriculum with emphasis on MEMS in university environment, particularly at Queen’s University in Canada. This curriculum is designed in a team project-based manner but in modular form. The lecture will be delivered by two main instructors and some guest instructors for different topics. The team members for each project have complementary background or coming from different discipline. The pertinent resources at Queen’s University, including such in CMC Microsystems will be available to the students which solves the shortage of resources for teaching.