Coventor improves speed and compatibility of MEMS and IC co-design

CARY, USA: Coventor Inc.,the leading supplier of design automation solutions for MEMS, announced its MEMS+ 4.0 software suite for accelerating development of advanced MEMS devices and systems.

The MEMS+ suite enables MEMS and IC designers to rapidly explore and optimize designs in parallel in the MathWorks MATLAB and Cadence Virtuoso environments.

The MEMS+ 4.0 release features a new capability to export models in Verilog-A format and a full 64-bit implementation that allows more accurate modeling of complex MEMS sensors and actuators.

The MEMS+ 4.0 suite is a key part of Coventor's platform for MEMS development, which also includes the CoventorWare and SEMulator3D software suites. The platform provides a complete solution for designing and verifying state-of-the-art accelerometers, gyroscopes, microphones and many other types of MEMS.

This latest release of the MEMS+ suite extends the scope of the platform by providing a 'tunable' accuracy-versus-speed approach for co-designing MEMS and integrated circuits (ICs) and compatibility with more EDA analog/mixed-signal simulation environments.

Faster, more compatible MEMS modeling

With MEMS+ 4.0, MEMS designers can automatically generate and export Reduced Order Models (ROMs) in Verilog-A format for use by IC designers. These exported models simulate 100X faster than fully non-linear MEMS+ models and are compatible with all commercial analog/mixed-signal circuit simulators that support the industry-standard Verilog-A hardware description language.

During model generation, designers can select one or more non-linear input variables; all other input variables are linearized about selected non-linear operating points. This approach is ideally suited to sensor and resonator applications due to their relatively small displacement in comparison to air gaps.

In comparison to hand-crafted Verilog-A models, these automatically generated models simulate just as fast while capturing much more behavioral complexity, including multiple degrees of freedom, environmental sensitivities, critical non-linear effects and the influence of packaging on device performance.

Equally important, the MEMS+ approach is automated and much less labor intensive, eliminating opportunities for human error and assuring that the models stay in sync with design changes. When IC designers find behavior that requires deeper analysis, they can switch to full MEMS+ models in the Cadence Virtuoso environment for more detailed investigations.