MEMS

MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems) conquer our daily lives. They are everywhere: in our cars, at the doctor's office as well as in the plane that takes us to our vacation. But today it lacks an effective response to the demand for reliability of the different actors. In this lecture we will show you how a complete and systematic design flow for MEMS based systems will yield higher quality MEMS based microsystems that are able to operate in harsh environments (temperature, vibration, humidity, corrosion, high voltage ...) while being more power efficient, autonomous and reliable than the classic components they are replacing.

The Seminar was given by Open Engineering, TAIPRO Engineering and SoftMEMS

This example is a thermically-actuated micro-mirror. This mirror is made of 2 layers with different thermal expansion coefficient. The thermal actuation is often used in MEMS since the small dimension of the system induces fast response to thermal excitation.

The electrostatic effect is very important in MEMS since it is generally the most important force inside them. For example, the pull-in voltage detection is an important characteristic in MEMS simulation to prove the stability of a MEMS design.