Micro Electro Mechanical Systems Modeling by VHDL-AMS: Application to a Piezoresistive Pressure Sensor

Abstract

Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) are highly integrated devices, including sensors and actuators with their interface of signal processing. MEMS are hybrid systems that may include various electrical (digital and analogical) and non-electrical (mechanical, thermal, etc.) phenomena. This nature of MEMS and their phenomenal development, making them more and more complex, is not going along with the only one level of abstraction! Indeed, such complex systems, with multi-physical and multi-technological characteristics, require new tools for their simulation. Since the late 90s, which has known the appearance of MEMS and their rapid development, the scientific community faces a major challenge. At that time, MEMSs were already brought to replace ordinary microelectronic components. So they had to find a new modeling tool for them. To address this problem, the scientific community has started to develop new tools for multi-domain description of MEMS at multiple levels of abstraction simulation. New hardware description languages such as Verilog-AMS and VHDL-AMS have been developed for the description and simulation of such complex systems. In this paper, we tried to give multi levels of abstraction description of a micro machined piezoresistive pressure sensor. Such sensor combines mechanical, electrical and thermal phenomena which will be described and simulated at different levels of abstraction.