Modeling and simulation of microsystems: challenges and trends

Increasing integration levels bring the industry closer to building systems-on-a-chip. Exploding manufacturing costs drive investments in improved predictive capabilities by modeling and simulation. Microsystems have specific requirements with respect to the ULSI circuits, resulting mainly from the heterogeneous nature of their components. This paper summarizes the state-of-the-art in point tools and tool suites, as well as the major trends in simulation techniques applied to microsystems