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Coventor & Mancef MEMS Design Scholarship

By Dr Pio Iovenitti

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Norizan Mohamad, PhD student, was recently awarded one of four scholarships of one year license of Coventor's CoventorWare Designer/Analyser package for his project submission. The award is open to research students from around the globe, and this is the second year in a row that Norizan has received the scholarship.

Coventor, Inc. headquartered in Cary, North Carolina, provides software tools for developing micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS), microfluidics and semiconductor process applications. Mancef (Micro and Nanotechnology Commercialization Education Foundation) is an organisation promoting the commercialisation of emerging technologies. Norizan’s PhD project is titled “Design and fabrication of a microphone using MEMS technology”, and he has had one paper published on his work to date. The title of his project submission for the award, and summary, are presented below.

“Spring-supported capacitive MEMS microphone design”

The capacitive MEMS microphone has been designed using various shapes of diaphragm to further improve its sensitivity while reducing its size for many applications, including mobile communication and hearing aid devices. This project focuses on the design of a springsupported diaphragm microphone and investigates various performance effects such as open-circuit sensitivity, mechanical structures, pull-in voltage, noise level, and effective diaphragm area. This type of microphone is expected to have a better performance and reliability over the existing piezoelectric microphone while having the smallest size as possible.