Physical and reduced-order dynamic analysis of MEMS

In this paper, we first present an efficient physical level simulation method for the dynamic analysis of electrostatic micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS). This method is then used to analyze MEMS dynamics. Stiffness hardening or softening of MEM structures has been shown to depend both on the applied voltage and the geometry. The existence of multiple resonant peaks in the frequency response diagram has been presented. We have shown that a DC bias along with an appropriate AC bias can give fast switching at a considerably less peak power requirement. Finally, a reduced order model has been developed based on Karhunen-Loeve decomposition for the dynamic simulation of MEMS. Reduced order models are cheap in terms of memory and computational time and are needed to perform fast and efficient system-level composite circuit and micro-mechanical simulations.