IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 40, NO.

2, MARCH 2004

557

Finite-Element Simulation of Micro-Electromechanical Systems (MEMS) by Strongly Coupled Electromechanical Transducers

Miklos Gyimesi, Senior Member, IEEE, Ilya Avdeev, and Dale Ostergaard, Member, IEEE
AbstractThe paper introduces a new methodology for the strongly coupled electrostatic-structural finite-element (FE) simulation of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) using a novel distributed electromechanical transducer that is compatible with regular solid and lumped FE. Its application range is as general as the sequentially coupled procedures, but converges more robustly with about an order of magnitude smaller number of iteration. The new transducers apply automatic internal mesh morphing. The morphing allows the mesh density to be different across the domain permitting accurate modeling of fringing effects. Index TermsFinite-element methods, micro-electromechanical devices, modeling, transducers.

I. INTRODUCTION

HE increasing functionality of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) leads to complex geometrical configurations of MEMS [1][3], which requires efficient finite-element (FE) modeling techniques to solve coupled electromechanical problems. Lumped models are no longer applicable for devices where fringing electrostatic fields are dominant such as combdrives [1] or electrostatic motors [3]. There have been several numerical methods proposed for the treatment of electromechanical systems: FE or boundary-element methods using sequential physics coupling [4], [5]; strongly coupled but reduced order methods using fully lumped or mechanically distributed but electrically lumped 1-D [6], multidimensional [7], or modal-space transducers [8]. All these methods need some extra meshing or morphing, introduce simplifying assumptions, and may not be convenient to use. This paper introduces a distributed strongly coupled electromechanical transducer finite element with internal meshing/morphing for full and accurate modeling of the underlying physical phenomena. The new transducer can be used in an FE model with classical lumped and/or solid mechanical elements. II. HISTORICAL REVIEW

domains. However, it cannot be applied to small signal modal and harmonic analyses because a total system eigenfrequency analysis requires matrix coupling. Moreover, sequential coupling generally converges slowly and not robustly. To eliminate these shortcomings, a strongly coupled lumped transducer element was introduced in [4] and [6]. Coupling between electrostatic forces and mechanical forces can be characterized by mapping the capacitance as a function of the device motion. Modeling the fully coupled system, the lumped transducer stores electrostatic energy as well as converts it into mechanical energy and vice versa. The lumped transducer is a line element with voltage and structural displacements degrees of freedom as across variables and current and force as through variables. Its input is a capacitance-stroke relationship that can be derived from electrostatic field solutions. The electrostatic mesh is removed from the problem domain and replaced by a distributed set of lumped transducers hooked to the mechanical and electrical FE model providing a highly efficient reduced order model (ROM) of a coupled electrostatic-structural system. The transducer handles the difficult hysteric pull-in/release analysis well [5], [7]. However, the lumped transducer is applicable only to simple geometries when fringing effects are insignificant. The paper introduces a distributed transducer, which does not have these geometrical restrictions, whereas inheriting its excellent convergence behavior, due to the strong coupling of mechanical and electrostatic physics domains. III. FORMULATION The full FE model of an electromechanical system, most typically a MEMS device such as a combdrive shown in Fig. 4, consists of classical mechanical elements (lumped or distributed) and the new distributed transducer elements. The mechanical elements are used to model the electrodes and support structure and store mechanical energy (elastic and kinetic). The space between the electrodes is meshed by the transducers, shown in Fig. 1 (2-D for the sake of simplicity), that store electrostatic energy (magnetic energy is neglected). The transducers have electrical potential and structural displacement as nodal degrees of freedom. The reactions are electrical charge and mechanical force . In a standard electrostatic FE model, the mesh is constant. In the new transducer, the mesh morphs during solution. In Fig. 1, the solid lines show the original element and the dashed lines show the morphed element. The new morphed node location

Sequential coupling between electrical and mechanical FE physics domains for MEMS analysis was introduced in [4]. That allows the most general treatment of individual physics

Manuscript received July 1, 2003. M. Gyimesi and D. Ostergaard are with ANSYS, Inc., Canonsburg, PA 15317 USA (e-mail: miklos.gyimesi@ansys.com; dale.ostergaard@ansys.com). I. Avdeev is with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15261 USA (e-mail: ivast@pitt.edu). Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TMAG.2004.824592

0018-9464/04$20.00 2004 IEEE

558

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 40, NO. 2, MARCH 2004

The nodal forces and charges can be calculated using the virtual work principle (5) (6) The mesh morphs and the potential distribution develops such that at equilibrium, forces between transducers and mechanical elements balance each other. In most practical cases, the system of equilibrium equations is linear from an electrical point of view but highly nonlinear from a mechanical point of view. The nonlinear system of static equilibrium equations can be solved using the NewtonRaphson method (7) where and are the increments of nodal displacements and are the out-of-balance nodal forces and potentials, and charges, and the blocks of the tangent stiffness matrix are given by (8) (9) (10) (1) (11) where is the permittivity, is the element volume, is the electric field vector, and is the electrostatic potential. For a linear triangular or tetrahedral element with a constant permittivity, the integral in (1) can be evaluated analytically The mesh, including the structural domain and the air region, deforms to reach force equilibrium. The original nodes are constantly updated according to the electrostructural force equilibrium. This procedure is highly nonlinear and huge displacements are allowed for an arbitrary uneven mesh. For example, in Fig. 4, combdrive fingers can significantly penetrate, dragging the fine mesh at the corners while keeping the coarse mesh elsewhere. For the transient, modal or harmonic coupled-field FE analysis, in addition to the stiffness matrix given by (8)(11), the mass and damping matrices of the mechanical domain have to be calculated using standard mechanical finite-element method. The transducer element is also compatible to network electrical elements [4], which allows for static, transient, modal, and harmonic network analyses. IV. EXAMPLE PROBLEMS A. Dielectric Slab Capacitor The purpose of the following example is to illustrate the virtual work principle used in the transducer formulation [9]. The system consists of two anchored capacitor electrodes with constant charges, , and a dielectric slab sliding between the electrodes, suspended with a spring (see Fig. 2). The air permittivity is denoted as while the permittivity of the slab is denoted as

Fig. 1. Original (solid) and deformed (dashed) transducer element.

is computed as the sum of the original node location and the . Element quantities, such displacement vector as energy and electric field, are the functions of and . The formulation of the new transducer is based on RitzGalerkin variational principles. The total system energy is the sum of mechanical and electrostatic energies. The energy change due to electric potential and displacement changes produces reactions: electrical charges and mechanical forces. At equilibrium, these reactions balance each other at the internal nodes and balance applied external forces at the external nodes. That ensures the compatibility of transducer elements with regular mechanical elements. The electrostatic energy of is given by a transducer element

(2) is the number of element faces, is the altitude, where is the normal to the th face, and is the nodal potential. Assembling all transducer elements together, we obtain the total electrostatic energy of the system

(3) is the number of transducers, and is the system where capacitance matrix. This is similar to classical electrostatic FE capacitance matrix. The difference is that the transducers are morphing, the capacitance depends on nodal displacements; the are used in the strong coupling formulation. derivatives of The total energy of the system is (4)

GYIMESI et al.: FINITE-ELEMENT SIMULATION OF MICRO-ELECTROMECHANICAL SYSTEMS

559

Fig. 2. Dielectric slab capacitor (illustration of energy formulation). Fig. 3. Potential field distribution generated by two overlapped electrodes.

. The displacement of the slab is denoted by . The total potential energy is

(12) where is the electrode thickness, is the electrode width, is is the capacitance. the gap, is the spring stiffness, and The total force acting upon a slab is

(13) where is the potential difference between the electrodes. At equilibrium, the total force is equal to zero, from which the equilibrium displacement of the slab is

Fig. 4. Potential field distribution between combdrive fingers (see data in [1]).

(14) is equal to The mechanical system stiffness the spring stiffness because the electrostatic energy is a linear function of the displacement . B. Thin Electrode Combdrive This example (Fig. 3) is an idealization of the combdrive (Fig. 4): it has one pair of fingers (electrodes), which are infinitesimally thin and extended to the infinity. The overlap between the fingers is 16 m, and the gap is 2 m. The space around the electrodes is filled with air. The potential difference is 4 V. Because of the geometry, the fringing field effects are significant (the equipotential lines are shown in Fig. 3). The N and values of computed forces are N. Without fringing fields, according to the analytical formula of a plate capacitor, the forces would N and N. The be: agreement between results is reasonable. However, to reach this agreement the mesh had to be substantially refined around the electrode edges, since 99.9% of the horizontal force was concentrated near the electrode tips [10].

C. Combdrive Transducer Fig. 4 shows the potential distribution in the air between the pulled-in fingers of a realistic FE model of the combdrive transducer [1]. The comb fingers are meshed by regular mechanical FE. The air region between the comb fingers is meshed by the transducers in the original position (not shown). The mesh is refined near the edges and corners of comb fingers in order to accurately calculate fringing fields (see example B). The large geometrical change of the air domain with highly unevenly mesh is properly captured by transducer morphing. The computed values of driving force match within 1% margin with literature results [1]. D. Clamped Beam Pull-In/Release Bending In this example, the new transducer element is used to efficiently solve the difficult pull-in/release hysteric beam-bending contact problem [5]. This difficulty is caused by the stability problems due to the bifurcation of static equilibrium. The maximum vertical beam deflection (in micrometers) versus potential difference between the beam and the ground is depicted in Fig. 5. Lacking analytical solution, the new strongly coupled results are compared against results obtained by sequentially coupled procedures [4], [5]. There is a good agreement regarding

560

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 40, NO. 2, MARCH 2004

E. Current Pulse Driven RF Switch The new transducer is applied for a transient coupled-field analysis of an RF switch driven by a current pulse [11]. The switch is modeled as a variable gap capacitor with parallel square electrodes. One electrode is fixed in space and another one is attached to a spring-damper system. The transducer elements are used to model the air gap between the electrodes. The results of FEA (stroke versus time) agree very well with the results obtained using RungeKutta time integration scheme [11] (see Fig. 6). The transducer works robustly with charge, voltage, force, or displacement loads. REFERENCES
Fig. 5. Hysteresis loop: pull-in with contact and release (see data in [5]). [1] W. C. Tang, T.-C. H. Nguyen, M. W. Judy, and R. T. Howe, Electrostatic-comb drive of lateral polysilicon resonators, Sens. Actuators A, vol. 2123, pp. 328331, 1990. [2] R. T. Howe, B. E. Boser, and A. P. Pisano, Polysilicon integrated microsystems: technologies and applications, Sens. Actuators A, vol. 56, pp. 167177, 1996. [3] A. J. Sangster and V. D. Samper, Accuracy assessment of 2-D and 3-D FE models of a double-stator electrostatic wobble motor, J. Microelectromechan. Syst., vol. 6, pp. 142150, June 1997. [4] ANSYS Release 5.6 User Manuals, 1999. [5] J. R. Gilbert, G. K. Ananthasuresh, and S. D. Senturia, 3D modeling of contact and hysteresis in coupled electro-mechanics, in Proc. MEMS96, 1996, pp. 127132. [6] M. Gyimesi and D. Ostergaard, Electro-mechanical transducer for MEMS in ANSYS, in Proc. 1999 Int. Conf. Modeling/Simulation Microsystems, Apr. 1999. [7] I. Avdeev, M. Gyimesi, M. Lovell, and O. Onipede, Beam modeling for simulation of MEMS transducers using strong coupling approach, in 6th U.S. Nat. Congr. Comput. Mech., Dearborn, MI, Aug. 14, 2001. [8] M. Gyimesi and D. Ostergaard, FE based ROM of micro electro mechanical systems (MEMS), in Int. Conf. MSM 2000, San Diego, CA, Mar. 2729, 2000. [9] A. E. Fitzgerald, C. Kingsley, Jr., and S. D. Umans, Electric Machinery. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990. [10] I. Vago and M. Gyimesi, Electromagnetic Fields. Budapest, Hungary: Akademia Kiado, 1998. [11] L. Castaner, J. Pons, R. Nadal-Guardia, and A. Rodriguez, Analysis of the extended operation range of electrostatic actuators by current-pulse drive, Sens. Actuators A, vol. 90, pp. 181190, 2001.

Fig. 6. Transient response of the current-pulse driven switch (see data in [11]) The difference between two curves, less than 1%, cannot be seen on a graph of this size.

the accuracy whereas the new transducers converging more robustly and quickly (ten times faster).