Electrothermally Actuated and Piezoelectrically Sensed Silicon Carbide Tunable MEMS Resonator

Tunable MEMS cantilever resonators electrothermally actuated and piezoelectrically sensed

“…The observed frequency tuning capability in our cantilevers is similar to other electrothermal cantilever resonators [19,28,29]. However, the frequency tuning capability of the cantilevers is significantly smaller compared to our previous finding with the electrothermally actuated double-clamped beam [11,13] and ring resonators [30], indicating that the cantilever resonators are much less sensitive to surface stress-induced variations in resonant frequency [23]. The frequency tuning characteristic can be improved either by scaling dimensions of the resonant structure or by optimizing the layout of the electrothermal actuator to cover more surface area of the beam.…”

“…In addition, it offers stronger electromechanical coupling, better impedance matching and relatively simpler fabrication compared to electrostatic transduction [5]. On the other hand, electrothermal actuation, among conventional techniques for electrical induction of mechanical vibrations, offers advantages such as simple fabrication process, low actuation voltages, impedance matching and effective resonant frequency tuning [6][7][8][9][10][11]. The ability to tune resonant frequency actively is of paramount importance for maintaining performance of MEMS resonators, as MEMS fabrication process uncertainties (dimensional and material property variations, and residual stresses) and changeable environmental conditions can cause shift in the resonant frequency [12].…”

“…Recently, we have demonstrated the combination of electrothermal actuation and piezoelectric sensing on double-clamped beam MEMS resonators [11,13]. Although cantilever structures have been driven into resonance electrothermally successfully, the resonant operation has been detected optically [14], capacitively [15] and piezoresistively [16].…”

Highly Tunable Electrothermally and Electrostatically Actuated Resonators

“…They showed that the frequency could be decreased by 42.6%. Sviličić et al [23] presented design, fabrication, and electrical testing of MEMS resonators actuated electrothermally and including a piezo-electric sensor to detect the resonance frequency of these resonators. They demonstrated that with the increase of the electrothermal actuation voltage a tuning range of 17 kHz could be realized for a device resonating at 1.766 MHz.…”

Active Frequency Tuning for Magnetically Actuated and Piezoresistively Sensed MEMS Resonators

“…As process variations in manufacturing and thermal drift may lead to variations and mismatch in the mechanical resonant frequencies, it is necessary to tune the frequencies of these resonators, as well as for applications like mechanical signal processing that will require signal tracking and frequency hopping [1]. Frequency tuning methods can be roughly divided into passive [2] and active [1], [3]- [6] methods. The active methods are able to maintain frequency matching through the lifetime of the device.…”