Besides foundry facilities, Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools are also required to move microsystems from research prototypes to an industrial market. Currently available CAD tools need extensions before they can be used for the automated design of micromachined devices. This paper presents a low cost access to microsystem technology (MST), applied by the CMP service, and based on the use of existing microelectronics production lines, with additional post-processing for microsystem specific 2D and 3D structures, and a global CAD approach for the design and simulation of microsystems applied to currently available commercial CAD tools, e.g. Mentor Framework, in order t o ensure a continuous flow from the design to the manufacturing.

Due to severe thermal problems of today's VLSI integrated circuits the need for reliable and quick thermal, electro-thermal and logi-thermal simulation tools is increasing, In this paper, we discuss the latest advances in the SISSI package (simulator for integrated structures by simultaneous iteration) which is a tool developed originally for analog VLSI design. The improvements include electro-thermal ac and transient simulation and the consideration of the thermal voltage of Si-Al contacts. Furthermore, we introduce a new module of SISSI, LOGITHERM, which is aimed at the self-consistent logic and thermal simulation of large digital VLSI designs. The features of our simulator package are highlighted by simulation examples that are compared in most cases with measurement results.