In this letter, we report the design and measurement of a 3D solenoid inductor that is embedded in a Si substrate and can integrate an iron core. Various inductor designs were fabricated with good structural integrity and repeatability via a CMOS-compatible MEMS fabrication process. The average inductance and quality factor peak-to-peak variation of the inductors was below 10%, which indicates that the fabrication process is repeatable. Among the inductors without iron cores, the highest quality factor (37.6 at 21 MHz) was found in a 5-turn inductor, and the highest inductance and inductance density (respectively, 86.6 nH and 21.7 nH/mm2) were found in a 20-turn inductor. Among the iron-core inductors, the 15-turn inductor had an inductance of 1063 nH and an inductance density of 354.3 nH/mm2, nearly 18 times higher than the same design without an iron core, which is the highest inductance density for a MEMS microinductor to the best of our knowledge. This type of inductor is an important component in RF MEMS and electromagnetic power MEMS devices and can improve their performance and efficiency.

Due to the large surface-area-to-volume ratio, microchannel heat exchangers have a higher heat transfer rate compared with traditional scale heat exchangers. In this study, the optimum microchannel cavity with high heat transfer and low flow resistance is designed to further improve microchannel exchangers’ thermal performance. A three-dimensional laminar flow model, consisting of Navier–Stokes equations and an energy conservation equation is solved and the conjugate heat transfer between the silicon basement and deionized water is taken into consideration. The impact of the shape, aspect ratio, size and spacing of the cavity on the thermal performance of microchannel exchangers are numerically investigated, respectively. The results indicated that the cavity on the sidewall can enhance heat transfer and reduce flow resistance simultaneously, and cavities with a relatively small expansion angle and streamlined edge could enhance thermal performance the most. Based on the conclusions, a new cavity shape is proposed, and the simulation results verify its excellent thermal performance as expected. Furthermore, investigation is performed to figure out the optimum design of the new cavity and the optimal geometric parameters of the cavity under different flow conditions have been obtained in principle for microchannel exchangers’ design.

The application of microchannel heat exchangers is of great significance in industrial fields due to their advantages of miniaturized scale, large surface-area-to-volume ratio, and high heat transfer rate. In this study, microchannel heat exchangers with and without fan-shaped reentrant cavities were designed and manufactured, and experiments were conducted to investigate the flow and heat-transfer characteristics. The impact rising from the radius of reentrant cavities, as well as the Reynolds number on the heat transfer and the pressure drop, is also analyzed. The results indicate that, compared with straight microchannels, microchannels with reentrant cavities could enhance the heat transfer and, more importantly, reduce the pressure drop at the same time. For the ranges of parameters studied, increasing the radius of reentrant cavities could augment the effect of pressure-drop reduction, while the corresponding variation of heat transfer is complicated. It is considered that adding reentrant cavities in microchannel heat exchangers is an ideal approach to improve performance.

A miniature integrable transformer is an obstacle to the miniaturization of packaged power supply on chip (PwrSoC). This letter introduces a through-silicon via (TSV) high-aspect-ratio toroidal transformer manufactured using microelectro-mechanical systems and electroplating. The primary coil and secondary coil of the transformer are interleaved on the toroidal core cavity, which is entirely wrapped in silicon, and a 1.2 mm high toroidal Ni-Zn ferrite core is formed. A 15:15 turn transformer is fabricated with a compact coil size of Φ4.1 × 2 mm with an aspect ratio (ratio of TSV depth to diameter) of 20. Measurements show that it has an inductance of 105 to 115 nH in a high frequency range of 1 to 80 MHz and a coupling coefficient of ∼0.7 in the range of 1 MHz to >15 MHz. Compared to that of the transformer without the Ni-Zn ferrite core, the coupling coefficient of the toroidal transformer increases by 40% with an inductance increase of 20%. At a frequency of 14 MHz, the transformer has a maximum quality factor of 16.7. The small size, IC compatible manufacturing process and excellent performance at high-frequency of the transformer proposed, meet the further integrated and miniaturized needs of PwrSoC.

This paper presents a micro electromagnetic vibration energy harvester (VEH) that uses complementary metal-oxide-semiconductorcompatible 3D micro-electromechanical system coils and a ferromagnetic core to improve efficiency and output power. A systematic model is proposed to describe the nonlinear electromagnetic damping coefficient and nonlinear attraction between the magnet and the ferromagnetic core. The nonlinear model agrees well with the finite element calculation results. Then, a vibration model is established by considering nonlinear stiffness and damping coefficient to obtain the dynamic characteristics and output performance of the system. Furthermore, a numerical method is conducted to systematically investigate the influence of air gap and initial magnet offset under different excitation amplitudes. The simulation results indicate that with a smaller air gap, the output power is higher. Moreover, there is an optimal initial magnet offset in relation to the air gap to maximise the output power of the system. These conclusions and analysis models can be generalised and can be used as a guidance for the designs of similar structural devices. The results also show that the structure proposed in this study can significantly enhance the energy harvesting performance compared with published data of conventional VEHs.

We conducted systematic numerical investigations of the flow characteristics within the entrance region of rectangular microchannels. The effects of the geometrical aspect ratio and roughness on entrance lengths were analyzed. The incompressible laminar Navier–Stokes equations were solved using finite volume method (FVM). In the simulation, hydraulic diameters ( $D_h$ ) ranging from 50 to 200 µm were studied, and aspect ratios of 1, 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, and 2 were considered as well. The working fluid was set as water, and the Reynolds number ranged from 0.5 to 100. The results showed a good agreement with the conducted experiment. Correlations are proposed to predict the entrance lengths of microchannels with respect to different aspect ratios. Compared with other correlations, these new correlations are more reliable because a more practical inlet condition was considered in our investigations. Instead of considering the influence of the width and height of the microchannels, in our investigation we proved that the critical role is played by the aspect ratio, representing the combination of the aforementioned parameters. Furthermore, the existence of rough elements obviously shortens the entrance region, and this effect became more pronounced with increasing relative roughness and Reynolds number. A similar effect could be seen by shortening the roughness spacing. An asymmetric distribution of rough elements decreased the entrance length compared with a symmetric distribution, which can be extrapolated to other irregularly distributed forms.