Python-Based Open-Source Electro-Mechanical Co-Optimization System for MEMS Inertial Sensors.

Rui Amendoeira Esteves,Michael Kraft,Chen Wang

doi:10.3390/mi13010001

Abstract

The surge in fabrication techniques for micro- and nanodevices gave room to rapid growth in these technologies and a never-ending range of possible applications emerged. These new products significantly improve human life, however, the evolution in the design, simulation and optimization process of said products did not observe a similarly rapid growth. It became thus clear that the performance of micro- and nanodevices would benefit from significant improvements in this area. This work presents a novel methodology for electro-mechanical co-optimization of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) inertial sensors. The developed software tool comprises geometry design, finite element method (FEM) analysis, damping calculation, electronic domain simulation, and a genetic algorithm (GA) optimization process. It allows for a facilitated system-level MEMS design flow, in which electrical and mechanical domains communicate with each other to achieve an optimized system performance. To demonstrate the efficacy of the methodology, an open-loop capacitive MEMS accelerometer and an open-loop Coriolis vibratory MEMS gyroscope were simulated and optimized—these devices saw a sensitivity improvement of 193.77% and 420.9%, respectively, in comparison to their original state.

Highlights

The surge in fabrication techniques for micro- and nanodevices gave room to rapid growth in these technologies and a never-ending range of possible applications emerged
To show the effectiveness of the developed software, as the first demonstration, an ment of the proof-mass in the z-axis, with a mass-spring-damper model illustrated in Figopen-loop capacitive microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) accelerometer is designed, simulated, and optimized
The MEMS accelerometer generates a detectable capacitance change, which is read by a capacitance-to-voltage circuit, governed by Equation (6)

Summary

Introduction

The surge in fabrication techniques for micro- and nanodevices gave room to rapid growth in these technologies and a never-ending range of possible applications emerged. The developed software tool comprises geometry design, finite element method (FEM) analysis, damping calculation, electronic domain simulation, and a genetic algorithm (GA) optimization process. It allows for a facilitated system-level MEMS design flow, in which electrical and mechanical domains communicate with each other to achieve an optimized system performance. Simulate, and optimize MEMS inertial sensors, engineers typically separate the process in two very distinct—yet symbiotic—domains: mechanical and electrical domains This workflow is often strictly divided and a great deal of simplification is applied to one of the domains in order to allocate computational resources to achieve a complete simulation and optimization of the other [2]. Wang et al [8,9] presented a MEMS mechan-

Methods

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Discussion

Conclusion