Electrostatically Tunable Nanomechanical Shallow Arches

Abstract

We report an analytical and experimental study on the tunability of in-plane doubly-clamped nanomechanical arches under varied DC bias conditions at room temperature. For this purpose, silicon based shallow arches are fabricated using standard e-beam lithography and surface nanomachining of a highly conductive device layer on a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer. The experimental results show good agreement with the analytical results with a maximum tunability of 108.14% for 180 nm thick arch with a transduction gap of 1 µm between the beam and the driving/sensing electrodes. The high tunability of shallow arches paves the ways for highly tunable band pass filtering applications in high frequency range. INTRODUCTIONMicro/Nanoelectromechanical systems (MEMS/NEMS) have received considerable attention in the recent decade for their interesting advantages for several applications, such as mass/gas sensing [1,2]