Batch fabrication of metal oxide sensors on micro-hotplates

Abstract

We report the parallel fabrication of miniaturized chemical sensors by the direct integration of nanostructured transition metal oxide films onto micro-hotplate platforms based on micromachined suspended membranes. This has been achieved by local deposition on a 10 × 10 membrane wafer of a supersonic cluster beam through a microfabricated auto-aligning silicon shadow mask. The sensing properties of the obtained devices were tested with respect to various gaseous species. For reducing and oxidizing species such as ethanol and NO 2 , very good performance in terms of linearity and sensitivity was observed. These results demonstrate the feasibility of the coupling of a bottom-up nanofabrication technique such as supersonic cluster beam deposition to a top-down microfabricated platform for a direct and parallel integration methodology of nanomaterials in MEMS.

High-throughput shadow mask printing of passive electrical components on paper by supersonic cluster beam deposition

“…[15][16][17] In particular, we have shown that this approach called supersonic cluster beam deposition (SCBD) can be efficiently used for the fabrication of electrically conductive patterned structures and devices on a wide variety of substrates, including polymers. 18,19 Here we present the rapid and reproducible parallel fabrication of sets of resistors and capacitors on paper by using SCBD and a shadow mask.…”

Biotechnological applications of supersonic cluster beam‐deposited nanostructured thin films: Bottom‐up engineering to optimize cell–protein–surface interactions

“…The study of nanostructured titanium oxide (ns‐TiO 2 ) thin films production using argon as carrier gas began approximately 10 years ago. Cluster‐assembled ns‐TiO 2 films have a semiconducting behavior that was initially studied for application in catalysis and sensors . Recently, we began to study and to use ns‐TiO 2 thin films as a substrate for biological applications because it is possible to use them with optical instruments, like phase contrast microscopy or confocal microscopy, since ns‐TiO 2 argon thin films are optically transparent with an estimated refraction index of 1.7 .…”

“…Cluster-assembled ns-TiO 2 films have a semiconducting behavior that was initially studied for application in catalysis and sensors. 30,[45][46][47] Recently, we began to study and to use ns-TiO 2 thin films as a substrate for biological applications because it is possible to use them with optical instruments, like phase contrast microscopy or confocal microscopy, 48,49 since ns-TiO 2 argon thin films are optically transparent with an estimated refraction index of 1.7. 50 Also ns-TiO 2 thin films have structure constituted by nanocrystals embedded in an amorphous material which show good adhesion on various substrates (e.g., glass, mica, and polymer).…”

The Electrical Conduction at Early Stages of Cluster-Assembled Films Growth

“…A deeper knowledge in this field would provide benefits to many technological applications where the understanding of the influence of the nano-and mesostructure on transport properties are crucial. Examples are gas sensing through conductimetric microdevices, where the presence of chemical species in air is detected through variations of the electrical conduction of a nanostructured oxide film [8][9][10][11][12], as well as interconnections in highly integrated multi-layer electronics (3D electronics), where grain-boundary and surface scattering may affect electrical resistivity when the lateral dimensions are scaled down to nanometric length scales [13][14][15][16].…”