Thesis (M.Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-83). Also available in electronic version.

Since the proliferation of CAD tools, visualizations have gained importance.. They provide invaluable visual feedback at the time of design, regardless whether it is fbi civil engineering or electronic circuit design-layout. Typically dynamic visualizations are produced in a two phase process: the calculation of positions and rendering of the image and its presentation as an animated video clip. This is a slow process that is unsuitable fbr interactive CAD visualizations, because the former two require finite element analysis Faster hardware eases the problem, but does not overcome it, because the algorithms are still too slow. Our MEMS CAD project works towards methods and techniques that are suitable for interactive design, with faster methods. The purpose of this PhD thesis is to contribute to the design of an interactive virtual prototyping of Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) This research comprises the analysis of the visualization techniques that are appropriate for these tasks and identifying the difficulties that need to be overcome to be able to offer a MEMS design engineer a meaningful and interactive CAD design environment Such a VR-CAD system is being built in our research group with many participants in the team. Two particular problems are being addressed by presenting algorithms for truthful VR visualization methods: one is for displaying objects that are different in size on the computer screen. The other is modelling unsynchronized motion dynamics, that is different objects moving simultaneously at very high and vety low speed, by proposing stroboscopic simulation to present their dynamics on the screen They require specific size scaling and time scaling and filtering. It is these issues and challenges which make the design of a MEMS CAD tool different from other CAD tools. In the thesis I present algorithms for displaying animated virtual reality for MEMS virtual prototyping in a physically truthful way by using the simulated stroboscopic illumination to filter animated images to make it possible to show unsynchronized motion.. A scaling method was used to show or hide objects which cannot be shown simultaneously on the computer screen because of their large difference in size. The visualization of objects being designed and their animations is done with much consideration of visual perception and computer capability, which is rising attention, but not too often mentioned in the visualization domain.