Developing a microresonator in IntelliSuite

In this recent paper in IEEE Electron Device Letters, IntelliSuite is used in the development of a single-crystal-silicon micromechanical resonator.  This bulk-mode resonator was designed to have a Q factor of 1.16 million for high frequency stability at a resonant frequency of 2.18 MHz.   IntelliSuite was used to validate this behavior for the specific resonator design.  Shown below is a schematic of the resonator and a contour plot of the displacement taken from the simulation in IntelliSuite.

Schematic and displacement results for resonator

Industry sponsorships at UCSC MEMS Design Course

Students at UC-Santa Cruz will be designing and fabricating MEMS devices in an upcoming Intro to MEMS Design course taught by Prof. Joel Kubby. The students wil use IntelliSuite to design and model their MEMS devices.

Prof. Kubby is currently looking for industry sponsors who will specify the device to be fabricated and will have access to student papers and presentations describing the device design.  For more information, contact Prof. Kubby at jkubby@soe.ucsc.edu.

IntelliSuite at Cambridge

Researchers at the University of Cambridge recently used IntelliSuite to assist with the design of a micromachined electrostatic charge sensor. The group used IntelliSuite to simulate various designs of the device and determine which design would give them the desired resonant frequency. An SEM of the variable capacitor used in the device is shown below.

SEM of variable capacitor

The paper, “A Resonant Micromachined Electrostatic Charge Sensor”, is part of the September 2008 edition of the IEEE Sensors Journal and can be downloaded here.

Nankai University’s application of Clean Room

In “A Novel Design Methodology for MEMS Device“, a paper submitted to the 2007 IEEE Conference on

Micropump modeled in IntelliFAB.

Nanotechnology, researchers from Nankai University discuss virtual modeling and simulation of MEMS devices. As part of the paper, the group uses the IntelliFab/FabViewer module of IntelliSense’s Clean Room package to simulate the fabrication process of a thermally-actuated micropump. The figure on the right shows the entire device including the bimetallic membrane and microvalves.

Shown below is the process flow used to construct the bimetallic membrane of the micropump. The bimetallic strip is electro-thermally actuated (passing a current heats up the bimetallic strip causing the membrane to deflect up and down). The group also plans to substitute the bimetallic actuator with a piezoelectric actuator.

Process flow for bimetallic membrane, automatically generated in IntelliSense’s Clean Room process modeling tools.