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Microsystems used for chemical analyses and biological assays are termed BioMEMS or labs-on-a-chip. These systems often require some of the traditional electromechanical capabilities of MEMS, and in addition require the manipulation of fluids in either continuous flow or droplet form. The distinction between continuous flow and droplets defines two broad categories of BioMEMS. Different applications call for one or the other of these approaches, but in either case, software for design and simulation can make a significant contribution to design optimization and reduction in time to market. A computer aided design and analysis approach is presented in which system-level analysis is favored over detailed analysis, although it is shown that this is not always possible, nor preferred. Examples of the use of design and analysis software in BioMEMS development are presented including: electrostatic actuation, a lab-on-a-chip for separation, on-chip optics, a digital fluidic processor, electrospray ionization, and a two-stage chemical reaction.

In this paper, we present an efficient macromodel extraction technique for gas damping and spring effects for arbitrarily shaped MEMS devices. The technique applies an Amoldi-based model-order-reduction algorithm to generate low-order models from an FEM approximation of the linearized Reynolds equation. We demonstrate that this approach for generating the frequency-dependent gas-damping model is more than 100 times faster than previous approaches, which solves the linearized Reynolds equation using a transient FEM solver. The low-order gas-damping model can be easily inserted into a system-level modeling package for transient and frequency analysis. The simulated results are in good agreement with experimental results for four different devices.

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