Silicon nanowire coupled micro-resonators

Piezoresistive silicon nanowire resonators as embedded building blocks in thick SOI

“…Based on standard IC-compatible processes, the fabrication technology is shown to deliver Si NW electromechanical resonators within a thick substrate with a two-order-of-magnitude scale difference between the Si NW and the surrounding architecture. Operation frequencies demonstrated are in the order of those reported in thin SOI [11][12][13], trench etching [14,19,25] and bottom-up [8,30] studies. The obtained Q for embedded Si NW resonator in thick SOI is also found to be comparable to those of several top-down reports [25,31,32].…”

“…Alternatively, Si NW resonators on CMOS platforms are obtained by the top-down approach [11,12] offering lowpower consumption and scalable transduction [13]. Top-down technologies are mainly available for thin microelectronic substrates, where the out-of-plane dimensions of the Si NW resonator and the surrounding architecture are the same [14][15][16]. For the cases where the Si NW has to be attached to a much thicker MEMS device, a similar approach is adopted, where the nanoscale component is fabricated in thin silicon on insulator (SOI) first.…”

Fully CMOS integrated bandpass filter based on mechanical coupling of two RF MEMS resonators

“…The fabricated bandpass filter presents very low passband distortion (less than 0.1 dB) without using any specific resistive termination, a central frequency of 26.7 MHz and a bandwidth of 120 kHz (with a bias voltage of 18 Vdc). The low passband distortion achieved is better than the state-of-the-art filters reported [1,2,4,5]. Unfortunately, the filter presents a very high insertion loss in the magnitude, which corresponds to the large motional resistance present in the CMOS-MEMS resonators compared with the input impedance of the test equipment.…”

“…Many studies have focused on developing high-order filters for enhanced frequency response based on electrical or mechanical coupling of several MEMS resonators [2][3][4][5][6][7]. All of these examples use specific technologies for the fabrication of MEMS resonators.…”

Large range MEMS motion detection using integrated piezo-resistive silicon nanowire

“…In any case, silicon nanowires remain sensitive piezoresistive gauges owing to their low cross section. Previous works combining MEMS with silicon nanowire used transferred nanowire [10] or top-down fabricated nanowire [11,12] directly attached to the moving structure. This limits both the motion detection range to the elongation limit of the nanowire and the stress resolution of in-situ measurements of nanowire stress gauge factors [10].…”