We present a surface-micromachined capacitive microphone with a membrane center hole and back-plate supports. The proposed membrane center hole reduces air damping at the center of the membrane and increases the sensitivity and frequency response. The back-plate supports allow for a deep back-chamber and prevent deformation of the back-plate. The proposed microelectromechanical-system (MEMS) microphone is fabricated using fully CMOS-compatible processes. The fabricated MEMS microphone has a membrane 500 μm in diameter and a center hole 30 μm in diameter. A deep back-chamber with a depth of 100 μm is formed by the back-plate supporting structures. During fabrication, the residual stress of the membrane is minimized using PECVD silicon nitride inserted in the metal membrane. The measured residual stress of the sensing membrane is 14.8 MPa. Acoustic measurements show that the sensitivity of the microphone is −49.1 dBV Pa −1 @1 kHz at a 12 V dc bias voltage, which is in good agreement with the calculated value.
This paper presents a novel fabrication method of scalloping-free and footing-free vertical electrodes for micromachined capacitive inclinometers with a high sensing resolution. The proposed fabrication method is based on additional crystalline wet etching of a (1 1 0) silicon that is bonded to a silicon substrate with a patterned insulator layer. The sensing electrodes, which are aligned to the (1 1 1) plane, have very smooth sidewalls because the morphological defects formed by the silicon deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) process are drastically reduced in the crystalline wet etching. The fabricated capacitive inclinometer with smooth sensing electrodes was evaluated in terms of capacitance change and resolution. The capacitance of the fabricated inclinometer is changed from −0.246 to 0.258 pF for the inclination angle (−90° to 90°). The temporal deviation of the capacitance is as small as 0.2 fF, which leads to a high resolution of 0.1° or less for ±45°.
In this paper, we present a concave-patterned TiN/PECVD-Si3N4 /TiN diaphragm micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) acoustic sensor based on a polyimide sacrificial layer. The use of the spin-coated polyimide eliminates the additional Al pad process of conventional device fabrication due to simple O2 ashing to release the sacrificial layer, simplifying the photolithography process. Also, to adjust the acoustic sensor for a bottom-ported package, its diaphragm was implemented to be placed over the back-plate. The TiN/PECVD-Si3N4/TiN multi-layer diaphragm was formed with the stress controllability of PECVD-Si3N4 from −162 MPa to +109 MPa. Furthermore, a parallel-plate capacitance model on the basis of an approximately linearized electric field method (ALEM) is proposed to evaluate the capacitance of two plates. The modelled capacitance showed less than 3.7% error in FEM simulation, demonstrating the validity of the proposed model. At a zero-bias voltage, the effective intrinsic and parasitic capacitances in the active area were 1.656 pF and 0.388 pF, respectively. Moreover, with a pull-in analytical model by using ALEM, the effective tensile stress for the diaphragm was extracted to +31.5 MPa, where the pull-in voltage was 10.7 V. In succession, the dynamic response for the open-circuit sensitivity was modelled with an equivalent circuit model based on lumped parameters. The measured open-circuit sensitivity of −45.1 dBV Pa−1 at 1 kHz with a bias of 9.6 V was only slightly different from the modelled sensitivity of −45.0 dBV Pa−1. Thus, these results demonstrate that the proposed sensor is suitable for a front-end voice capture module.
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