David Bindel
UC Berkeley
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dbindel
Thursday, March 9
3 :10-4:00 p.m.
1065 Kemper - refreshments to follow in 1131 Kemper Hall
Computer Aided Design of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems: Eigenvalues, Energy Losses, and Dick Tracy Watches
Resonant Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) can be used as sensors, frequency references, and filters. Surface-micromachined resonators currently under development can be integrated with circuitry, so that soon a "cell phone on a chip" may be possible. For these resonators to be useful for such radio applications, engineers need to understand and minimize the amount of damping in the system. In this talk, we discuss the numerical modeling of damping mechanisms for high-frequency resonant MEMS, and describe how the mathematical structure of the numerical models can be used to make fast algorithms for modal analysis and for the construction of reduced-order models. We then describe HiQLab, a simulation package designed to study resonant MEMS. Using HiQLab, we predicted a previously-unknown mode interference phenomenon which causes substantial variation in the quality of certain high-frequuency disk resonators. We explain the reason for this phenomenon, and compare our simulated results to measured data.