MEMS Emulator: A Tool for Development and Testing of Electronics for Microelectromechanical Systems

The paper presents the first tool for the emulation of microelectromechanical systems (MEMSs) to be used for the characterization of electronics designed for MEMS. With such a tool, electronics of different nature (integrated, discrete-component, and instrumentation) can be tested (debugged) as in operation, even in the absence of physically available MEMS transducers. The proposed MEMS emulator (MEMU) was implemented through a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) core that synthesized the MEMS transfer function, and through interfaces to the analog electronics under test (ADC to sense signals generated by the electronics, and DAC to provide the emulated MEMS output signal). The parallelism and programmability offered by the FPGA implementation allowed to synthesize several second-order effects of MEMS (noise, spurious modes, feedthrough capacitance, and so on) and to cover a wide range of selectable MEMS parameters. A first prototype of MEMU was developed and experimented. Various MEMS operating up to 25 kHz, with quality factors in the 10(-1)-10(6) range, were successfully emulated with associated non-idealities. Furthermore, the test of a printed circuit electronic board for piezoresistive MEMS resonators coupled to MEMU to realize a MEMU-based oscillator was shown as a paradigmatic example of the debugging of electronics for MEMS transducers.