MEMS Design Competition: The Envelope Please...

The Cadence Academic Network sponsored a MEMS design contest over the last couple of years. At CDNLive EMEA 2018, the winners were announced.

The idea was to encourage groups to design using a mixture of the Cadence analog/mixed-signal design tools, the Coventor MEMS design tools, and with an XFAB PDK. One part of the prize was that XFAB would manufacture the winning device.

The Competition

The competition was announced at DATE 2016 and later that year 23 initial proposals were submitted from 10 countries (Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, UK, Malta in Europe; UAE, Saudi Arabia, China, India in Asia; Egypt, and Mexico, which I guess are technically in Africa and North America). One thing I thought was interesting was the number of submissions from countries that are not the first to spring to mind when you think of semiconductors.

In 2017 that was reduced to 11 teams once the experts decided which submissions were both realistic and potentially manufacturable by XFAB (the main reason for rejection was technology incompatibility). There was a MEMS workshop to get everyone up to speed on how to do design with the Cadence tools, the Coventor tools, and the XFAB PDK, which were all provided free to the contestants.

The winners would get $5,000 and their design manufactured by XFAB. The silver medal got $2,000, and the bronze got $1,000.

In 2018, the designs were submitted, the judges judged, the winner was put into an envelope and…well, we won’t open the envelope yet.

The Top Three

At CDNLive EMEA, the three top teams, without yet knowing which order they were ranked, presented their projects (10 minutes each).

The top three were:

• KAUST, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Saudi Arabia). Their project was titled MEMS Resonator for Oscillator, Tunable Filter and Re-Programmable Logic Device Using Partial Electrodes. They attacked the problem of MEMS relays not working very well due to high contact resistance and created devices using resonance to carry the data values. A lot of vibration was a 1; not much was a 0.
• A combined team from ESIEE and Sorbonne Université in Paris (France). Their project was titled 3D Vibration Energy Harvester fabricated with a commercial MEMS process and using the electrostatic transduction. They built a device that used a moving plate capacitor to generate small amounts of charge from external vibration, and then used the electronics to collect the charge. Energy harvesting products like this can potentially be used in implantable medical devices and other portable electronics that need to operate without an external power source. 
• A team from the unlikely combination of University of Liège, KU Leuven, Microsys, and Zhejian University (Belgium and China). Their submission was titled Genetic Algorithm for the Design of Nonlinear MEMS Sensors with Compliant Mechanisms, demonstrated using a capacitive MEMS accelerometer. They noticed that MEMS devices always seem to be boring and rectilinear, so they decided to be interesting and curvy. They created a MEMS design program that would take as input the desired parameters and then iterate around curvilinear designs until the program converged on something weird (“freeform” was their word) that met the parameters. See the example to the right.

And the Winner Is...

Vice-president of XFAB Volker Herbig presented the awards before dinner that evening in front of all the CDNLive EMEA attendees. The first place went to the team from ESIEE and the Sorbonne. So congratulations to Paola Carulli, Somiran Karmakar, Abdelkrim Bessaad, and Profs. Philippe Basset and Dimitri Galayko.

Second was the team from Thuwai. No, I didn't have any idea where it was either. That's the team from Saudi Arabia. Leaving third place to the Belgian/Chinese team.

And a surprise extra award when Volker said that all 3 winnings designs would be fabricated by XFAB, not just the winning entry.

For another take on the competition, here's the Coventor blog post.

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