Proceedings of IMECE 2009
ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition
November 13-November 19, 2009 Lake Buena Vista, Florida, USA
IMECE2009-10525
1 Copyright © 2009 by ASME
FAST HARMONIC MEMS SIMULATION WITH
ARNOLDI MODEL ORDER REDUCTION
David Binion and Xiaolin Chen
Mechanical Engineering
School of Engineering and Computer Science
Washington State University Vancouver
Vancouver, WA 98686
ABSTRACT
Recent years has witnessed a large increase in the use of
vibrating Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems (MEMS)
especially in the expanding wireless telecommunication
industry. In particular, the use of microresonators to generate
or filter signals has facilitated a reduction in the size of many
popular cell phones. Advances in microfabrication have
increased the ability to create complex MEMS devices. Finite
Element Analysis (FEA) has widely been used in the design of
these devices. To obtain accurate simulations of complex
MEMS devices, a dense FEA mesh is required resulting in
computationally demanding simulation models. Arnoldi
Model Order Reduction has been investigated and
implemented to improve the computational efficiency of
MEMS simulations. Using ANSYS, a popular FEA program, a
micro resonator model was created. With Arnoldi, a Krylov
subspace was extracted from the model and the model was
projected onto the subspace reducing the model size. A
harmonic simulation over normal operating frequencies was
performed on the reduced model and compared with a
simulation of the original model. It was found that the
computational time was drastically reduced through the use of
Arnoldi while achieving similar accuracy as compared to the
original model.
INTRODUCTION
Recent years has seen a large increase in the use of
vibrating Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems (MEMS)
especially in the expanding wireless telecommunication
industry. In particular, micromechanical resonators have
displayed the ability to achieve high quality factors with low
power consumption which along with their small size has
made them attractive options for use as signal generators or
signal filters [1,2]. The increase in their use has led to focused
research in the design and modeling of microresonators [1-4].
Finite Element Analysis (FEA) has widely been used to
model microresonators. Detailed solutions obtained through
FEA describe the resonators harmonic response over its
operating frequency. However, harmonic simulation of
electromechanical devices through FEA must account for the
interactions between two physics domains which can be
computationally expensive. In addition, micromachining
advances has allowed the creation of increasingly complex
MEMS structures. Fine FEA discretizations are required to
accurately simulate these complex devices which place
additional demands on CPU and computer memory resources.
Model Order Reduction (MOR) techniques [5-12] have
been shown to be an effective method for alleviating the
computational demands of MEMS simulations. MOR is a
process that reduces the dimension of a system of Ordinary
Differential Equations (ODEs) obtained from FEA
discretization. The reduced system is then used to simulate the
full scale model behavior. To achieve accurate reduced model
simulations, essential full scale model characteristics must be
maintained; namely the input/output behavior [9].
The Arnoldi algorithm [13] is a MOR technique that has
shown the ability to maintain these characteristics while
reducing computational demands. Reduced models produced
via Arnoldi are generated based on a specific operating
frequency. J. Lienemann et. al. [7] demonstrated MOR for a
reduced model of a micro-mechanical gyroscope. Harmonic
simulation was performed over a wide range of operating