Modeling and simulation of micromachined accelerometer using multi-port-element network method

A method for modeling and simulation of MEMS based on multi-port-element network is presented. With this method, the functional components of inertial MEMS are modeled as multi-port-elements and a crab-leg accelerometer is represented as a network composed of these models. All the models are coded in the analogy hardware description language of MAST and simulated on the Saber simulator. With this approach, the system behavior can be rapidly analyzed and the influence of its parameters on the system performance can be evaluated. The simulation of modal frequency of the crab-leg accelerometer model agrees to that of the finite element analysis (within 1.0%). Simulation results indicate that the system sensitivity is seriously influenced by the width of the crab-leg beam, so the fabrication error of the beam width should be reduced as much as possible. The system responses to sinusoidal and pulse input signals are also investigated.