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This chapter describes best practices for one of the most important decisions a fabless MEMS company will make: selecting a foundry partner for volume wafer manufacturing.

For every company embarking on commercialization of a new product, a crucial question will be, “How much is it going to cost to develop this technology into a product?” Investors and executives need foresight on how much budget might be consumed prior to the arrival of revenue. In this chapter, we describe a method for estimating MEMS product development costs.

MEMS prototype fabrication can be expensive and very time-consuming. In this chapter, we introduce some basic strategies to minimize the risk of failure and to maximize learning and data-gathering in every prototyping run.

A MEMS design and the process flow that creates it are inseparable. In this chapter, we describe some MEMS process integration strategies, and what decisions can be made along the way in order to enable a new process flow and mask set to have a high probability of success in the fab.

This chapter presents insights and tools for creating unit cost models for ongoing production (recurring cost). A unit cost model is essential to establish the viability of a future business that must profit from selling its MEMS product. Although this chapter focuses on unit cost models for MEMS devices, the content will also be applicable to modeling any wafer-manufactured product, such as semiconductor, photonic, or nanotechnology devices.

In this chapter, we provide details regarding the steps of technology transfer in the context of working with a MEMS wafer foundry. The best practices and guidelines we describe, however, also apply to transferring any component to a third-party volume manufacturing vendor, such as an OSAT (off-shore assembly and test).

The MEMS product is a system composed of more than just the MEMS device. The MEMS product also includes the package, electronics, software, and possibly other components. This chapter introduces the typical components of a MEMS product, their roles, the partitioning of functions among components of the system, and the possible levels of physical integration. We limit the discussion in this chapter to an overview of the function partitioning and do not discuss the very wide variety of possible physical implementations.

Manufacturing test benefits the MEMS product company in many ways, including continuous improvement of the product, its yields, and its unit cost. Achieving these goals requires significant investment in equipment and a dedicated team. This chapter discusses the opportunity and cost of manufacturing test and strategies to manage risks.

The MEMS device is only one part of the MEMS product that includes the package, the electronics, and potentially other components. The development of the package and the electronics can each take years, so serial development is not practical. This chapter discusses methods to codevelop the MEMS, package, and electronics in parallel.

Micro electromechanical systems, or MEMS, are a technology that encompasses an amazing variety of devices that enrich products in diverse applications such as consumer electronics, automobiles, medical devices, industrial equipment, spacecraft, and more. While that variety creates valuable product differentiation and business opportunities, it also stubbornly resists standardization, which poses a challenge to commercialization. This chapter motivates the strategies and best practices, described throughout this book, for enabling successful MEMS product development.

Understanding the infrastructure for semiconductor device manufacturing provides important context for MEMS development. However, MEMS devices differ from other semiconductor devices, and these differences impact MEMS device development. This chapter discusses the semiconductor device manufacturing infrastructure and highlights ways MEMS device manufacture is both similar and different.

Completed wafers from the foundry go through the back-end-of-line (BEOL) to become individually packaged and tested die. The back end process imposes requirements on the MEMS die design and wafer layout, which are best accommodated in the early development stages. This chapter describes BEOL activities and points out some of the requirements imposed on MEMS die design and wafer layout.

Transferring technology from a research and development facility to a volume production facility is a critical turning point in MEMS product commercialization. This chapter discusses the technical and business factors needed to determine your company’s readiness to make this important transition.

The MEMS field may be rapidly maturing, but there are still few shortcuts through the stages of MEMS product development. Whether you are launching a breakthrough product or a next-generation design of an existing product, your product must go through multiple stages of development to achieve commercialization. This chapter outlines the significance and the challenges of five stages of MEMS product development: proof-of-concept prototype, advanced prototypes, foundry feasibility, foundry pilot production, and foundry production. Understanding why you need these stages, when these stages occur, and what evaluation gates exist between stages can ease your company through the MEMS product development process and, most importantly, ensure you have enough resources to reach your final goal.

MEMS product development requires a team of people to supply necessary expertise and functional roles. The team will have both internal and external members, the latter including key service vendors and material suppliers. The team composition must evolve and enlarge to reflect the progressing needs of MEMS development. This chapter outlines the essential functional roles needed at different development stages, as well as for different company profiles, during MEMS product development.

This chapter describes how to begin the task of designing a MEMS device from scratch, an effort that will proceed in parallel with design of other key pieces of the MEMS product system, such as the package and electronics. We describe how to use analytical models to efficiently estimate the design space of a novel device and thereby assess feasibility in the context of practical manufacturing and operational limits. We also describe when and how to effectively deploy computational modeling, accounting for uncertainty in input values, in order to save time and cost during product development.

A critical turning point of product commercialization is transferring the product technology and prototype from the R&D facility where the advanced prototype development occurred to the manufacturing facilities (or team) for foundry production. The MEMS product technology must be documented thoroughly to make the transfer process as efficient as possible. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the minimum set of documentation needed for the transfer process and our best practices for effective documentation.

In this chapter, we describe business strategies for acquiring and using third-party intellectual property to accelerate the development of new MEMS products. Disclaimer: This chapter does not provide legal advice. Please consult with a qualified intellectual property attorney for appropriate legal advice.

Development test is part of the design-fabrication-test workflow loop to develop a new MEMS device. This chapter first defines and distinguishes different types of test, including development test, manufacturing test, and qualification test. The chapter then discusses identifying test requirements, establishing test capability, and strategies for failure analysis during development.