Microsystems used for chemical analyses and biological assays are termed BioMEMS or labs-on-a-chip.These systems often require some of the traditional electromechanical capabilities of MEMS,and in addition require the manipulation of fluids in either continuous flow or droplet form.The distinction between continuous flow and droplets defines two broad categories of BioMEMS.Different applications call for one or the other of these approaches,but in either case,software for design and simulation can make a significant contribution to design optimization and reduction in time to market.A computer aided design and analysis approach is presented in which system-level analysis is favored over detailed analysis,although it is shown that this is not always possible,nor preferred.Examples of the use of design and analysis software in BioMEMS development are presented including:electrostatic actuation,a lab-on-a-chip for separation,on-chip optics,a digital fluidic processor,electro-spray ionization,and a two-stage chemical reaction.

It has recently been shown that the boundaryelement method can be used to perform accurate cross-talk simulations of three-dimensional integrated circuit interconnect. However, the computational complexity grows as , where is the number of surface unknowns. Straightforward application of the fast-multipole algorithm reduces the computational complexity to order , but produces magnified errors due to the ill-conditioning of the steady-state problem. We present a mixed surface-volume approach and prove that the formulation results in the exact steadystate solution, independent of the multipole approximations. Numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of this technique. On a realistic example, the new method runs fifteen times faster than using dense-matrix iterative methods.