Systematic mask synthesis for surface micromachined microelectromechanical systems

Abstract

In the context of designing surface-micromachined microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), there does not appear to be systematic means, with the exception of parametrized layout models, to generate the mask data after the geometric model of a MEMS device is refined through behavioral simulations. This paper focuses on automatically generating masks, given a geometric model of the MEMS device and the process sequence (referred to here as the inverse problem). This necessitates a systematic solution of the forward problem, which involves automatically generating a geometric model of the MEMS device given the masks. A systematic and implementation-independent framework for the geometric modeling of MEMS is presented in order to solve the forward and inverse problems for general surface-micromachined devices. In particular, the geometric problem of mask synthesis is reduced to a system of linear equations.