A Macro Model Based On Finite Element Method To Investigate Temperature And Residual Stress Effects On RF MEMS Switch Actuation

Till nowadays, MEMS design suffers from the lake of efficient and easy-to-use simulation tools considering the complete MEMS design procedure, from individual MEMS component design to complete system simulation. Finite element analysis (FEA) methods offer high efficiency and are widely used to model and simulate the behaviour of MEMS components. However, as MEMS are subject to multiple coupled physical phenomena at process level, such as initial stress, mechanical contact, temperature, thermoelastic, electromagnetic effects, which highly affects the component, we need to integrate these effects in our model. Doing so, finite element models may involve large numbers of degrees of freedom so that full simulation can be prohibitively time consuming. As a consequence, designers must simplify models or concentrate on interesting results in order to obtain accurate but fast solution. Some multiphysics´ softwares, such as COMSOL [3], allow Reduced Order Modeling (ROM) or macro models which considers the global behaviour of the device. Thus designers can create automatically, for example, their own Simulink (Matlab copy) library from a multiphysics finite element modelization, in order to develop a global behavioural model of the whole component. This work deals with a Simulink macro model, generated from a three-dimensional multiphysics finite element analysis (FEA) using COMSOL, aiming to investigate the pull-in and pull-out voltage of microswitches.