Modeling, Simulation, and Verification of an Advanced Micromirror Using SUGAR

We present some of the design, modeling, and simulation features of a computer-aided engineering tool for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) called SUGAR. The features include a flexible SPICE-like netlist language for MEMS design, a simple modeling framework for computationally efficient lumped models, an extensible architecture to which users can add features, and the ability to display 3-D circuits together with deflected electromechanical structures. Since SUGAR is programmed in MATLAB, many MATLAB functions and toolboxes may be used with SUGAR. Such attributes facilitate the exploration of design spaces and feature modifications. In this paper, we describe SUGAR´s extensible architecture, flexible design methodology, modeling framework, and reduced-order modeling technique. We do not present the many other advances made for SUGAR by other developers. For a test case, we choose an advanced microdevice that is difficult to simulate with conventional MEMS software. We show that the relative errors of our lumped models are less than 3% of the finite-element analysis (FEA), that the computational costs are less than 1% of the FEA, and that simulation of the test case fairly agrees with the experiment.