Micro electro-mechanical system design tool with flexible design flows

One Micro electro-mechanical system (MEMS) design tool with flexible design flows is presented, which makes it possible that the MEMS designers are able to choose the most suitable design flow for their specific devices. The maximal flexibility in choosing the design flow meets the requirements of various MEMS devices and improves the current structured design method which emphasizes one unified top-down design flow. The design tool is divided into three levels and interconnected by six interfaces. The three levels are lumped-element model based system level, finite element analysis based device level and process level, which covers nearly all modeling and simulation functions for MEMS design. The six interfaces are proposed to automatically transmit the design data between every two levels, thus the maximal six design flows can be realized. The interfaces take the net list, solid model and layout file in standard format as the data inlet and outlet for the system, device and process level respectively. The realization of these interfaces are presented and verified by design examples, which also proves that the enough flexibility in the design flow can really increase the design efficiency.