Lee C.-Y., Antonsson E.K.
California Institute of Technology, US
Keywords: bulk etching, etching simulation, MEMS, surface reconstruction
Previously, a computationally efficient and geometrically accurate etching simulation was developed to compute con-tours of constant depth at different time steps [1]. Experi-mental verification of this early work has been established [2]. However, contours are not amenable to the analysis and de-sign of microsystems, since it is often necessary to determine object interaction and mechanics in which surface or solid representations of shape are required. Hence, the problem of surface reconstruction is of particular interest. It has been noted that surface reconstruction is an interpolation problem, explaining the predominance of triangulation techniques in many surface reconstruction algorithms [3], [4]. One very effective code, by Boissonnat and others, partitions the con-tours in a single cross section into Delaunay triangles, then connects the triangles between adjacent cross sections to form Delaunay tetrahedra that can be used for finite element anal-ysis. The surface representation is easily extracted from the bounding tetrahedra. An implementation of Boissonnatís al-gorithm to the problem of surface reconstruction of etched contours is discussed. Further, a simple algorithm is pre-sented to remove the bounding triangulations created by Bois-sonnatís code (i.e., the surfaces are closed). An application written in TCL and VTK, a freely available highly portable graphical toolkit, to interactively view the resulting surfaces of triangles is discussed.
Journal: TechConnect Briefs
Volume: Technical Proceedings of the 1999 International Conference on Modeling and Simulation of Microsystems
Published: April 19, 1999
Pages: 117 - 119
Industry sector: Sensors, MEMS, Electronics
Topic: Modeling & Simulation of Microsystems
ISBN: 0-9666135-4-6