Coordinating Lab Resources for a Project-Based MEMS Course

Rochester Institute of Technology's EMCR870 - Microelectromechanical Systems course is a unique course in which we use an accelerated schedule to design, fabricate, package and test MEMS devices designed by the students. This is a goal-oriented class and lab as opposed to the more typical structured class. Real-life situations are mimicked in which limited resources force the students to make timely decisions to meet the project timelines. In order for this experience to be successful, the resources provided to the students must be carefully coordinated and managed so that they are available when needed. These include software availability, both for literature research, simulation and layout design; availability of fabrication tools, which must be scheduled around other researchers and academic users; packaging resources; and test equipment availability, which also needs to be made available to the students. A schematic description of the needed resources for each phase and who manages each of the resources is presented in Figure 1. Both graduate and undergraduate students embark on a 10-week long project in which they must research, design, fabricate, package, test and characterized their own MEMS systems. A three-week design deadline must be met in order for the student's design to be included in the fabrication run. During these three weeks the students must research a particular device, understand its basic operation and design a unique device that is compatible with the given fabrication and design rules. The more successful students will perform literature research and simulate their structures in commercially available software before laying out their devices. Fabrication takes place in an accelerated schedule in which processing takes place twice a day in blocks of three hours. Students are asked to attend one of the fabrication blocks per week plus a review session at the end of each week. This mimics real-life situations in which engineers will not participate in all fabrication steps but must be able to collect the needed information to determine how the issues that may arise during fabrication will affect their device performance. In addition, preparations must be made so that fabrication tools will be available at the needed times and that no conflicts exist with other users of the lab. The students must prepare detailed plans for packaging and test before the fabrication of their devices is complete. This must be presented to the instructor before week 6 so that the proper preparations can be made. This may include fabricating custom PCB's or purchasing additional devices for signal conditioning electronics. Packaging, test and characterization takes place during the last 2 weeks. Students are asked to produce a datasheet of their devices, a 4-page technical paper and prepare a 10 minutes presentation. These are typical end-of-project requirements expected in a real-life work environment, and are again designed to provide that experience for the students. This paper will give examples of some recent student reports. Figure 2 presents the project timeline with the key deadlines. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of this teaching technique we conducted a survey to evaluate the course. The student's answers are classified based on their previous background. Preliminary data shows that students with previous work experience are more likely to be successful in this type of teaching setting while those without it seem to struggle but benefit the most. Surveys have also been sent out to alumnae of the course to assess how this type of teaching setting has helped them in their current jobs. Results of these surveys will be presented.