Design of a FEM based simulator for MEMS devices

Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems (MEMS) devices and sensors play a vital role in many industrial and commercial applications. Accurate and efficient simulators are required for the design of these MEMS devices. However, existing simulators are either costly (commercial tools) or suffer from issues like accuracy and inability to model complex geometries as in the case of open source simulators. In this paper, a 1D/2D framework is proposed which can simulate MEMS devices using Finite Element Method (FEM) as the discretization method. The proposed simulator can incorporate new mathematical models which will enable the industry and academia to design efficient MEMS devices. Simulations for static and dynamic analysis of a microcantilever beam has been performed using our proposed simulator. The results of our proposed simulator have been validated with COMSOL having the maximum error of 0.1454 × 10 −12 m and 0.02206 × 10 −6 m for static and dynamic excitation, respectively. The proposed simulator outperformed COMSOL with a speedup of 2.18 × for static and 10.71 × for dynamic analysis, and used 7.19 × less memory in both the cases.