An efficient numerical approach to electrostatic microelectromechanical system simulation

Computational analysis of electrostaticmicroelectromechanical systems (MEMS) requires an electrostaticanalysis to compute the electrostatic forces acting onmicromechanical structures and a mechanical analysis to compute thedeformation of micromechanical structures. Typically, the mechanicalanalysis is performed on an undeformed geometry. However, theelectrostatic analysis is performed on the deformed position ofmicrostructures. In this paper, a new efficient approach toself-consistent analysis of electrostatic MEMS in the smalldeformation case is presented. In this approach, when themicrostructures undergo small deformations, the surface chargedensities on the deformed geometry can be computed without updatingthe geometry of the microstructures. This algorithm is based on thelinear mode shapes of a microstructure as basis functions. A boundaryintegral equation for the electrostatic problem is expanded into aTaylor series around the undeformed configuration, and a newcoupled-field equation is presented. This approach is validated bycomparing its results with the results available in the literatureand ANSYS solutions, and shows attractive features comparable toANSYS.