Welcome to E341
Announcements
6/05/08: Please bring 2 copies of your papers and e-mail me a soft copy of it by Friday 1:00 pm.
6/04/08: For the final poster session on Friday you have the option of bringing either one 30x45 (widthxheight) poster or 14 PowerPoint slides.
6/01/2008: Graded HW3 and 4 are on my desk.
5/29/2008: Poster sessions will be held on 6/6 (next Friday) from 1-3pm. in CISX patio. Bring your slides to the patio at noon so you get sufficient time to post them on to the panel.
5/28/2008: Graded HW2 are in my office.
5/28/2008: SCPD only: I'll have OH today from 6:30-7:30pm in CIS 201.
5/27/2008: HW4, Prob.2: Here are the standard chips for cap sensing:
Irvine Sensors MS3110
Analog Devices 7142
5/27/2008: Prof. Howe has OH today (Tuesday) from 12:30-2:20 and on Thursday from 1-4. I'll place a signup sheet in my office for 30 minute time slots for Thursday's meeting with Prof. Howe. You can start putting your name down today after 2:00 pm.
5/26/2008: Here is where you can download the simpler software for process visualization: SIMPLer
5/26/2008: You can download the evaluation version of the CleWin (layout tool) from: http://www.wieweb.com/download/CleWinEvalJuly2008.zip
5/23/2008: Here are some hints for HW4:
Prob. #1. "specimen" means DUT -- *not* the actuator!! The tensile test machine could be 1 cm x 1 cm if that many fingers are needed.
Prob. #2. "xcell" is MEMS-lingo for "accelerometer" -- *not* the Ball Semiconductor wacko spherical 3D accelerometer. You should see if you can figure out a suspension + proof mass sense cap layout that will beat Woo-Tae's pz-R design in the same area.
5/20/2008: If your group finished the Noise/Sensitivity lab last week then you won't need to show up this week.
5/20/2008: Here are Tina's comments about QFD on HW2:
For the QFD part of HW2: Generally teams did well on the QFD portion of their homework. One fairly common mistake I saw was teams trying to correlate the first two columns of the QFD prep spreadsheet. The customer needs and engineering metrics are just lists of each. The relationships between them will come in the QFD matrix.
I've picked out a few comments from the discussion section to illustrate some insights on the tools for the class. These comments are paraphrased to generalize them. 1. "We were surprised at the significance for the customer requirements in calculating the relative weights. The results highlighted the importance of the customer needs because the customer is ultimately the end user. When we design and build the device, we must keep in mind that performance can be sacrificed in order to meet the customer requirementst. This may seem counterintuitive during the engineering task of optimizing the device, but it is important in meeting the overall design requirements." Don't be afraid to lower performance specs if it helps a design better fit what customers want.
2. " Based on our QFD I analysis, we gave shape to abstract requirements and sorted out the most important engineering metrics. At the beginning our focus was not very sharp, meaning we were not sure which parameters were most important. Now we are much more confident about how to approach the design of our device and where to focus our energy. Furthermore, we put ourselves into the shoes of our customers. Looking at the problem from a different point of view gave us many insights that were not possible had we not conducted the QFD analysis. We now know which parameters are most important and can accordingly handle design problems including trade-off between parameters." Use QFD to help you figure out how to make good design tradeoffs.
"The customer perception benchmarking gave us insight into the current design space. The lesson learned here is that perhaps we should focus our energy in exploiting the shortcomings of the current dominant technology to find a niche in our intended market. The review of existing products is a first step in figuring out why some design solutions are superior to others in a given aspect." Think about how your technology fits your intended application and design to meet that application.
For homework 3, it's a good idea to include technical targets for the engineering metrics in CSMTM. I neglected to do this in the template so I didn't take points off for it, but wanted to make sure teams know to do it for any future use of CSMTM. Also, most teams didn't include much process detail in the CSMTM prep. This is ok if you're thinking about the process in more detail somewhere else. Think through enough detail to make sure the process steps are feasible and compatible with one another in sequence (e.g. chemicals, material properties, temp...).
Course Description
Miniaturization technologies now have important roles in materials, mechanical, and biomedical engineering practice, in addition to being the foundation for information technology. This course introduces design concepts for MEMS devices and provides training and qualification in fabrication. The course targets advanced graduate students with interest in using the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility in their research. This course has E240 or equivalent as a prerequisite.