Guidelines for Final Project

The final project is a significant part of the course - it allows you to synthesize the material we have covered in homework and lectures, and gives a chance to put it all together in a design exercise.

The project reporting consists of a final presentation, about 20 -30 minutes in length, to be delivered to the rest of the class and the invited guests. The presentation should be complete and delivered using PowerPoint, or the equivalent.  A computer and projector will be available on the day.

The PowerPoint slides will be handed in.  Each slide should be accompanied by discussion notes which should be (preferably)  inside the PowerPoint file (there is a place for notes).  If this is not possible, the discussion notes can be contained in a separate document.  The slides plus the discussion notes should give a complete guide to the project to someone who is not familiar with the project.

All material must be handed in in electronic form - either on a Zip disk or CD-Rom

The project should include the following elements:

1. Introduction and background - previous work, patents, commercial products, applications, etc
2. Overview of proposed device - how does it work, what are the key elements that make it advantageous.  What are the difficulties?
3. Device modeling and design - using computational, analytical, lumped-parameter models, etc to show how different design choice affect the performance.  The culmination of this will be a design that is justified using some modeling.
4. Fabrication - how is the device to be made?  What processes are standard, what processes are risky or novel?  Show the fabrication steps, and if necessary the mask layouts
5. Packaging - once the chip is complete, what steps need to be done to package it, connect it to the outside world and use it?  
6. Conclusions

The project is a group effort and a single grade will be given to the group.

There are two examples of projects from the U. of Md. MEMS course illustrating the kind of detail and range expected.