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13.7 Conclusion: Continuing Progress in MEMS
Modeling and Simulation
In the past fifteen years, much progress has been made in providing MEMS designers with simulators
and other tools which will give them the ability to make MEMS as useful and ubiquitous as was predicted
in [64]. While there is still much to be done, the future is bright for this flexible and powerful technology.
One of the main challenges remaining for modeling and simulation is to complete the design and
development of a high-level MEMS description language, along with supporting models and simulators,
both to speed prototyping and to provide a common user-friendly language for designers. One candidate
for such a language is VHDL-AMS. In [69], the strengths and weaknesses of VHDL-AMS as a tool for
MEMS development are discussed. Strengths include the ability to handle both discrete and continuous
behavior, smooth transitions between levels of abstraction, the ability to handle both conservative and
nonconservative systems simultaneously, and the ability to import code from other languages. Major
drawbacks include the inability to do symbolic computation, the limitation to ordinary differential
equations, lack of support for frequency domain simulations, and inability to do automatic unit conver-
sions. It remains to be seen whether VHDL-AMS will eventually be extended to make it more suitable
to support the MEMS domain. But it is highly likely that VHDL-AMS or some similar language will
eventually come to be widely used and appreciated in the MEMS community.
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