Implementation of MEMCAD system for electrostatic and mechanical analysis of complex structures from mask descriptions

Author

Gilbert, J.R. ; Osterberg, P.M. ; Harris, R.M. ; Ouma, D.O. ; Cai, X. ; Pfajfer, A. ; White, J. ; Senturia, S.D.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

fYear

1993

fDate

7-10 Feb 1993

Firstpage

207

Lastpage

212

Abstract

The development of a first implementation of the MEMCAD system (version 1.0) is reported. The system is composed of three commercial mechanical CAD software packages integrated with specialized structure generation and electrostatic analysis programs. The authors describe the system and demonstrate its capabilities using a comb drive example constructed directly from a CIH description of its mask set. The analysis of the comb drive, all the way from generating a full 3-D model from mask descriptions to calculating comb levitation forces, takes just a few hours

Keywords

CAD; electrostatics; masks; mechanical engineering computing; mesh generation; micromechanical devices; software packages; solid modelling; 3-D model; MEMCAD system; MEMS; PATRAN; capacitance matrix; comb drive; comb levitation forces; complex structures; eigenmodes; electrostatic analysis programs; mask descriptions; mechanical CAD software packages; mesh generation; micromachining; structure generation programs; Analytical models; Computational modeling; Computer simulation; Electrostatic analysis; Microelectromechanical devices; Micromechanical devices; Packaging; Sociotechnical systems; Software packages; Visualization;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Micro Electro Mechanical Systems, 1993, MEMS '93, Proceedings An Investigation of Micro Structures, Sensors, Actuators, Machines and Systems. IEEE.

Conference_Location

Fort Lauderdale, FL

Print_ISBN

0-7803-0957-X

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/MEMSYS.1993.296921

Filename

296921