Design of a next generation framework for MEMS devices

Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems (MEMS) devices and sensors have become an integral part of our daily life. From mobile phones to smart systems, there is a great demand of MEMS devices integrated with electronic circuits. Therefore, the design of an efficient MEMS devices has become of paramount importance. The design tools used in simulation of MEMS devices suffer from various issues, such as accuracy, time complexity, complex geometries etc. which need to be addressed in an efficient manner. Commercial tools used for MEMS device design are very costly and still provide limited scope for research and development. In this paper, a 2D framework is presented to simulate MEMS devices using Finite Element Method (FEM) as the discretization method. The proposed simulator can also be used to incorporate new mathematical models and is envisaged to enable academia and industry to work freely towards delivering efficient MEMS devices. FEM is used to discretize essential device equations, and later analyzed by using a suitable numerical methodology to find the solution. Displacement of a cantilever beam is obtained by using proposed MEMS simulator and is compared with the results obtained using COMSOL.