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A micromachined tunable resonator fabricated by the CMOS post-process of etching silicon dioxide

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Abstract

This work investigates the fabrication of a micromechanical tunable resonator using the commercial 0.35 μm complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process and the post-process of only one maskless wet etching. The post-process has advantages of easy execution and low cost. The post-process employs an etchant (silox vapox III) to etch the silicon dioxide layer to release the suspended structures of the resonator. The tunable resonator comprises a driving unit, a tuning unit and a sensing unit. The resonant frequency of the resonator can be tuned using a dc-biased electrostatic comb of linearly varied finger-length. Experimental results show that the resonant frequency of the resonator is about 4.8 kHz, and it has a frequency-tuning range of 6.8% at the tuning voltage of 0–25 V.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Professor Jong-Yih Lin of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Chung Hsing University, for assistance in experiment. In addition, we would like to thank National Center for High-performance Computing for chip simulation, National Chip Implementation Center for chip fabrication and the National Science Council of the Republic of China for financially supporting this research under Contract No NSC 93-2212–E-005-007.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Chung Hsing University, 402, Taichung, Taiwan, R.O.C.

    Ching-Liang Dai & Wei-Chiang Yu

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  1. Ching-Liang Dai
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  2. Wei-Chiang Yu
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Correspondence to Ching-Liang Dai.

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Dai, CL., Yu, WC. A micromachined tunable resonator fabricated by the CMOS post-process of etching silicon dioxide. Microsyst Technol 12, 766–772 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00542-005-0077-8

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