Abstract
The paper describes an approach to general-purpose design sensitivity analysis for electromagnetic devices. Microsystem technology often requires the assessment of manufacturing techniques or effects of tolerances. Emphasis is therefore put on the adaptability to different requirements, depending on desired accuracy, computational effort and significance. By introducing a distributed sensitivity function, the effect of small contour distortions can be described. The design sensitivity is based on a magnetic double-layer model. It is shown that sensitivity can be expressed in terms of virtual anti-parallel double-layer currents, flowing in a movable contour. The sensitivity is explicitly derived for two-dimensional coordinate systems using the finite-difference method within a commercially available field computation program. The proposed method is demonstrated by two examples.