Course content

The course consists of three introductory lectures (the dates for the lectures 2 and 3 will be decided at the first meeting) followed by the course work, which is framed by weekly progress meetings with the course responsible and his teaching assistants. The students will go through a complete microsystem engineering cycle, i.e. the goal of the course is that the students are able

1. to conceptualize, simulate, and design their own microsystem devices using state-of-the-art simulation and CAD tools,
2. to fabricate the devices in a state-of-the-art 200-mm wafer semiconductor clean-room laboratory, and
3. to characterize their devices and to analyse their failure mechanisms as well as propose design improvements.

The course starts with lectures introducing the student to MEMS design tools, and providing them with specifications of the real-world problems they have to solve (week 1). Then, the students will work in groups of 2–3, develop device concepts, and verify these using state-of-the art FEM simulation tools, and then design the devices with CAD software (no previous knowledge on FEM or CAD software is required for the course) (weeks 2-4). In the next step, the students will fabricate their own devices with state-of-the-art micromachining/semiconductor manufacturing tools in the the KTH clean-room laboratory (week 5-6). Afterwards, the students will evaluate their devices by characterizing them with various test setups to find out which of their designs has best performance according to the given specifications (week 6-7). In the final step, the students will analyze the failure mechanisms of their devices, and have to propose design improvements for a potential next development cycle (week 7). Week 8 is for report writing, preparation of the final presentation.