Project summary
Integrated Micro- and Nanosystems comprising integrated circuits, micro- and nano-electromechanical systems (Integrated N/MEMS or IMNS), and miniaturized components from the optical, thermal and fluidic domains are a key technology for all grandchallenges of the 21st century, such as energy, health care, environmental monitoring systems, and defense and security. A wealth of relevant new opportunities for the application of IMNS have been steadily opening up in several areas, often with ICs, N/MEMS and components from other physical domains used in combination as an embedded digital/analog/mixed-signal system. The design and manufacture of such systems is a technological and commercial issue of major relevance, with important consequences for the scope and impact of IMNS applications.
Unlike in the IC context, with a mature design automation (DA) industry, design of IMNS requires dealing with the multi-domain nature of the systems being designed, with the interaction of electrical, mechanical, thermal, etc. effects and subsystems that need to be modeled and considered simultaneously in the design process. Also, many INMS designs are setup and developed for a single system or perhaps a small collection of evolving systems, but cannot be easily reused in a more general sense. Hence, in most cases nowadays, design of IMNS is currently performed by ad hoc modeling of the micro- and nano-electro-mechanical components of the system, and no systematic design methodology is widely adopted, differently from the case of VLSI circuits design, modeling, and simulation.
The goal of this project is to carry out a coordinated research effort to address some of the critical challenges arising in the modeling and simulation of IMNS, by developing novel systematic hierarchical approaches for modeling, design, and simulation for IMNS. In turn this will enable the development of new design methodologies and tools that can generate automatically parametric models of IMNS and that support a hierarchical modeling procedure for the design of complex integrated systems. This allows the designer, starting from the interconnection of basic MEMS blocks, to construct models of more complex IMNS devices, ultimately including also the electronic circuitry necessary to interface with the external world. Such a design environment would greatly contribute to streamlining the design phase and shortening the development time of new devices.
Unlike in the IC context, with a mature design automation (DA) industry, design of IMNS requires dealing with the multi-domain nature of the systems being designed, with the interaction of electrical, mechanical, thermal, etc. effects and subsystems that need to be modeled and considered simultaneously in the design process. Also, many INMS designs are setup and developed for a single system or perhaps a small collection of evolving systems, but cannot be easily reused in a more general sense. Hence, in most cases nowadays, design of IMNS is currently performed by ad hoc modeling of the micro- and nano-electro-mechanical components of the system, and no systematic design methodology is widely adopted, differently from the case of VLSI circuits design, modeling, and simulation.
The goal of this project is to carry out a coordinated research effort to address some of the critical challenges arising in the modeling and simulation of IMNS, by developing novel systematic hierarchical approaches for modeling, design, and simulation for IMNS. In turn this will enable the development of new design methodologies and tools that can generate automatically parametric models of IMNS and that support a hierarchical modeling procedure for the design of complex integrated systems. This allows the designer, starting from the interconnection of basic MEMS blocks, to construct models of more complex IMNS devices, ultimately including also the electronic circuitry necessary to interface with the external world. Such a design environment would greatly contribute to streamlining the design phase and shortening the development time of new devices.
This project involves the ALGOS - Algorithms for Optimization and Simulation research group at INESC ID, a team with considerable experience on modeling and analysis of analog and mixed signal systems.
Sponsors
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