Automated synthesis of mixed-technology MEMS systems with electronic control

Abstract

Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) design requires an integration of elements from two or more disparate physical domains: mechanical (translational, rotational, hydraulic), electrical, magnetic, thermal, etc. Different parts of a MEMS system are traditionally designed separately, using different methodologies and different tools applied to different energy domains. Although major Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) such as VHDL, Verilog and SystemC have been supplemented with analogue and mixed-signal (AMS) extensions which are essential in analogue and mixed-technology design, development of corresponding analogue and mixed-technology synthesis methodologies is still lagging behind. Therefore, there is an increasing need for automated synthesis techniques that can reduce the development cycle and facilitate the generation of optimal configurations. This research investigates and develops techniques for automated high-level performance optimisation and synthesis of mixed-technology MEMS systems.

Results of this research have been published in 9 papers at peer reviewed international conferences and one two-part journal paper. Specific contributions of this research can be summarised as follows. Firstly, a dedicated distributed model of a mixed-technology MEMS case study of an accelerometer operating in a Sigma-Delta force-feedback control scheme is developed. The distributed behaviour is essential in the MEMS accelerometer design because it has been observed that sense finger resonance, usually not included in conventional models, affects the performance of the electromechanical Sigma-Delta feedback control. As shown in the simulation results, the Sigma-Delta loop failure, when the sense fingers bend seriously or oscillate, is captured by the proposed model but cannot be correctly modelled using conventional approach.

Secondly, a novel, holistic approach is proposed for automated optimal layout synthesis of MEMS systems embedded in electronic control circuitry from user-defined high-level performance specifications and design constraints. The synthesis technique has been implemented in SystemC-A and named SystemC-AGNES. The method efficiently, and in an automated manner, generates suitable layouts of mechanical sensing element and configurations of the Sigma-Delta control loop by combining primitive components stored in a library and optimising them according to user specifications. Synthesis results show that the proposed technique explores the configuration space effectively, and it develops new structures which have not been investigated before. This contribution has been published as a two part paper in the Sensors & Transducers Journal.

Finally, to enhance the modelling efficiency and capability of SystemC-A, for mixed-technology systems with crucial distributed behaviour, language extension has been proposed to efficiently support general partial differential equations (PDEs) modelling.

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