Lanterna Rally

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Published: 2005

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The modeling of electro-thermal processes, for example Joule heating, is becoming increasingly important in microsystems (in the following MEMS) development. In microelectronic systems, for example, high temperatures may cause the malfunction or even destruction of the device. Other devices, such as microsensors and microactuators need high temperatures to improve transduction efficiency. In both cases the designer should be able to predict the temperature distribution for the given electrical input and the impact of the temperature on the devices electronics in turn. In other words, one must run a joint electro-thermal simulation. Conventionally, in each sequence of electro-thermal simulation the temperature field is computed on a discrete grid whose size, due to increasingly complex microstructures, easily exceeds 100,000 degrees of freedom (DOF), i. e. ordinary differential equations. Although modern computers are able to handle engineering problems of this size, the system-level simulation would become prohibitive if full models were directly used. Hence, the reduction of the problem's size is the first milestone of efficient MEMS modeling and simulation. This thesis presents the application of mathematical model order reduction (MOR) methods (preferably Arnoldi algorithm) to the automatic generation of accurate dynamic compact thermal models (DCTM) of electro-thermal microsystems. Unlike conventional approaches to DCTM, which are based on the lumped-element decomposition of the model followed by parameter fitting, mathematical MOR is formal, robust and can be made fully automated. The reduced order models can be formally converted into Hardware Description Language (HDL) form and directly used in system-level simulation. The results obtained in this thesis led to the creation of the software tool mor4ansys at the chair for simulation of the university of Freiburg. Presently it is possible to use mor4ansys to automatically create reduced order thermal models (wi.