Announcement of MEMS Design Contest at DATE

On March 17^th in the Exhibition Theatre at DATE, there was the first public announcement of the worldwide MEMS Design Contest. The organizers Cadence, Coventor, and X-FAB provided an overview of the rules of the Design Contest and the proposed MEMS-Mixed Signal co-simulation and implantation design flow.

The motivational speech with the title “Academic MEMS Goes Fabless – The MASDAR Institute Perspective” was given by Dr. Ibrahim Elfadel, who is is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology. There he leads the Masdar Institute Center for Microsystems (iMicro) and is also the co-director of the ATIC-SRC Center of Excellence on Energy-Efficient Electronic Systems (ACE4S) and the program manager of TwinLab-MEMS, a collaborative project between the Masdar Institute and the Institute of Microelectronics in Singapore. During his talk he emphasized the importance of standardizing the technological processes for MEMS in order to make the design process simpler and cheaper. When asked at which stage the MEMS design process is currently at (compared to standard ASIC design), Dr. Elfadel answered: “Pre-Spice”, since most MEMS are still simulated with FEM-simulators in order to be able to capture their behavior. The new design flow, which has been developed within the MEMS2015 project is an attempt to change this and provide a MEMS-PDK, which simplifies co-development of MEMS and MS logic.

Find the slides to the presentation from Ibrahim Elfadel at this link, and click the icon below for the video:

The aims of the contest are as follows:

• To motivate design teams to start designing chips with MEMS and/or mixed-signal blocks using X-FAB PDK and tools from Coventor and Cadence
• Spread the knowledge about MEMS and mixed-signal co-design
• Get new ideas about how MEMS can be used and what kind of MEMS can be designed using the X-FAB PDK
• The winning team gets the possibility to manufacture a demonstrator in silicon in order to prove the functionality of the flow

The contest is open to students, researchers, entrepreneurs and companies from around the globe.  Design teams are encouraged to propose imaginative design concepts that combine MEMS and mixed-signal technologies. The organizers will provide free training workshops to familiarize the participating teams with the design tools, design methodologies and process technologies involved. The dates and locations of the trainings will be provided later as we will look to find the regions with the highest number of participants. All workshops will also be available online.

A panel of highly experienced industry professionals and respected academics will undertake appraisal of the submissions.  Each submission will be judged on the degree of innovation demonstrated in hardware and methodology, the novelty of the application and the value the design provides.  Awards for the top three submissions will be presented at Cadence’s annual user conference, CDNLive EMEA 2017 in Munich, and the winning team’s solution will be manufactured at X-FAB’s wafer production facilities.

X-FAB will provide access to XH035 Mixed Signal PDK and XMB10 or XMS10 MEMS PDK to the contest participants. The duty of the participants is to implement a MEMS and a Mixed-Signal MEMS-driver and readout logic driver in these technologies. They should create a proposal, implement the schematic, simulation environment and layout of the solution, co-simulate both designs to show their functionality, then present the simulation waveforms and the layout.

Click here to register your interest in the contest

Find the slides to the presentation about the contest rules at this link, and click the icon below for the video:

Find the slides to the presentation from X-FAB at this link, and click the icon below for the video:

Find the slides to the presentation from Coventor at this link, and click the icon below for the video:

Click the icon below for the video from the Cadence presentation:

Participants should join the Facebook event, where the next events will be announced: https://www.facebook.com/events/935152543221066

A LinkedIn group is available, where discussions between participants and organizers can be started: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8496841