PREFACE
This book aims to describe the principles of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) via a unified approach and closed-form solutions that I have newly developed. The book is designed for senior (or graduate) students in universities and engineers from industry who want to design MEMS without numerical simulation. Since readers will have diverse backgrounds (e.g., electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, physics, chemistry), the book is organized so that it will be easy to understand the theory and closed-form solutions presented, which are used to design micro- and even nanosystems.
Through eighteen years of professional experience on MEMS, I have come to realize that most systems are so complicated that their static and dynamic behavior is too difficult to be expressed in closed forms. MEMS are systems whose mechanical behavior is coupled with electrical or other behavior, such as optical behavior. As a result, the governing equations for many MEMS become complicated or nonlinear, and their solutions have generally been obtained using numerical methods. For example, parallel plates connected to a voltage source show highly nonlinear behavior, including the pull-in phenomenon (jumping at a critical voltage), and it was too difficult to obtain simple and exact solutions for the interplate gap, resonant frequency, and capacitance, and their sensitivity at arbitrary voltages. In order to develop theory on linear and nonlinear MEMS, I spent four years, and then another ...
