Fabrication of a ZnO piezoelectric micro cantilever with a high-aspect-ratio nano tip

Abstract

This paper reports on a ZnO piezoelectric micro cantilever with a high-aspect-ratio (HAR) nano tip, which is proposed for a ferroelectric material based nano storage system. The system uses the interaction between the nano tip and a storage medium, and the HAR nano tip is needed to suppress undesirable effects caused by the small gap between the cantilever and the storage medium. The fabrication process for the cantilever with the HAR nano tip consists of three parts: the HAR nano tip formation, the cantilever fabrication, and the bonding/releasing process. The HAR nano tip is formed by the Si deep reactive ion etching for a long shaft and the anisotropic wet etching for a nano tip end. The cantilever is made up of 1 μm-thick LPCVD poly-Si layer and 0.2 μm-thick Si nitride layer, and has 0.5 μm-thick ZnO actuation layer. A final releasing process is followed by an anodic bonding process. The fabricated HAR nano tip has 6 μm side length, over 18 μm height, and less than 15 nm tip radius, which is built on the 85 μm-wide, 300 μm-long, and 1.2 μm-thick cantilever. The experimental results show a linear behavior with respect to input voltage of 1 to 5 V and the first resonance frequency at 17.9 kHz.