A composite integrated mixed-technology design environment to support micro electro mechanical systems development

A major hurdle to the development of Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) resides on the lack of communication link between the mechanical (or physical) world and the electronic world. Within a development phase, each team handles the tools traditionally used in its disciplines without any common interface. When using fieldd solvers, e.g. finite elements methods (FEM), MEMS engineers identify materials properties and boundary conditions, and build a mesh, so the tool can run a 3D finite elements solution. The tool can predict the amount of stress and strain in the structures, the movement or any other interesting characteristics, but none of this information can be automatically transferred to an IC design tool. In addition, the straightforward advances within the latest developments of the mainstream semiconductorr industry is the use of already available intelluctual property (IP) in the develpment of systems optinally matched to the end product specifications. These prospects calls for a new generation of design tools that combines aspects of EDA and mechanical / thermal / fluidic CAD. The new product suite presented in this paper offers an integrated solution allowing a continuous design flow from front-end to back-end. The end objective is to bring to the system level designer, a complete design flow, down to the chip level, anchored on design re-use and reliable system-level simulation, thus leveraging standard IP products for the realization of sophisticated miniature systems, at low cost. The environment contains elements for the device designer, enabling him to design modules, to simulate them, and finally to put the knowledge in the form of characterized standard cells in library. Commercially available optimization and yield management tools have been extended to MEMS technology to enhance the work of the MEMS device engineer. Furthermore, tools, such as FEM to HDL-A translator, has been developed in order to bridge the gap between the device engineer and the system engineer. The tool allows the generation of nonlinear dynamic behavioral and functional HDL-A models from models on a hierarchical lower level of abstraction (such as Finite-elements or transistor-level description) or measured data. The system level user takes profit of this standard cell library that contains multi-level information (e.g. layout information, behavioral models, FEM-models) in order to run the complete design flow.