Page 58 - MEMS Mechanical Sensors

3.2 Simulation and Design Tools 47

Figure 3.6 Damping coefficient calculated using MemDamping.

MemTrans is the transient analysis solver that computes transient thermal and
mechanical deformation and stresses. A typical application is computing the failure
conditions of a shock protection limiter of inertial sensors.
Furthermore, there are fluidic solvers for designing and simulating microfluidics
devices and for integrating microfluidics and microarray technologies into lab auto-
mation and microarray products. MemCFD a general fluidic solver; NetFlow is an
electrokinetic fluidic solver; SwitchSim computes the electrokinetic response of a
species in a fluid subjected to a switched electric field; DropSim provides full three-
dimensional numerical simulation of droplet formation, transport, and impact;
BubbleSim simulates the movement of bubbles and surrounding fluids in micro-
channels; and ReactSim is a chemical reaction solver. BioChip Developer is a devel-
opment environment intended for users developing microscale biochemical analysis
and synthesis systems, such as DNA sequencing, protein separation, and lab on-chip
technologies. This software focuses on chip-scale implementation of biochemical
systems.
CoventorWare also facilitates the simulation of a variety of MEMS and other
microsystems-based RF components including switches, varactors, inductors, reso-
nators, transmission lines, antenna elements, and waveguides. Additionally, Coven-
torWare contains tools for designing optical MEMS devices such as mirrors,
shutters, fiber aligners used in optical switches, tunable optical filters, and lasers.
Finally, Integrator enables powerful macromodel extractions based on reduced
order models of the most common physical effects (stiffness, damping, and inertia)
found in most dynamic systems. This is done with three tools: (1) SpringMM
extracts linear and nonlinear mechanical and electromechanical spring stiffness, (2)
DampingMM provides a Stokes-equations flow solver that is applicable to arbitrary
geometries, and (3) InertiaMM computes the mass inertia of the movable parts of
the device. The extracted reduced order macromodels can be used in a system-level
simulator such as Saber or SimuLink.