An integrated simulator for coupled domain problems in MEMS

Abstract

An integrated circuit and microfluidic simulator is presented in this paper. It allows coupled simulation of flow, structure, thermal, and electrical domains. The overall architecture and various algorithms including the coupling of the circuit and microfluidic simulators are described. An application of the simulator is demonstrated for a controlled microliquid dosing system using detailed numerical models for the fluid field, a low-dimensional model for the flow sensor, and circuit elements for the electronic control. Unlike other simulators which employ mostly lumped models for the various components, we formulate here a methodology for distributed systems.

Towards numerical prototyping of labs-on-chip: modeling for integrated microfluidic devices

“…Developing techniques for global modeling of microfluidic networks, is an important step, if not the most important, toward the goal of performing whole-chip numerical prototyping. One of the more impressive techniques for performing such analysis was presented by Kirby et al (2001) who developed an integrated circuit and microfluidic simulator that allows for the coupled simulation of flow, structure, thermal and electrical domains using the SPICE3f5 for circuit simulation and their Nektar microfluidics code (Kirby et al 1999). The technique is demonstrated by modeling a microscale liquid-dosing system and promises as a technique for more complex MEMS devices.…”

A compact model for electroosmotic flows in microfluidic devices

“…Compact models can be enormously useful to microfluidic designers to quickly evaluate new design concepts as they are simplified models, very fast compared to detailed numerical simulators, and yet they are accurate enough to capture the basic physical characteristics [4][5][6]. As compact models can be easily integrated into readily available circuit design software, compact models for microfluidic devices can enable seamless and rapid integration of microfluidic devices with micromechanical, microelectronic and other components on a chip [7,8].…”

Formal Verification of Hybrid Automotive Systems

“…Even this is computationally expensive for formal analysis. Some of these simulation complexity aspects of MEMS components have been described in [32].…”