Design, Fabrication and Measurement of a Resonant Tunneling Diode Based Micro Accelerometer

Several piezoresistive micro accelerometers have been commercially used, nevertheless, their sensitivity is not high enough for some special applications. A novel ´piezoresistive´ micro accelerometer based on resonant tunneling diode (RTD) is proposed in this work, it is reported to be of higher sensitivity. To preliminarily study such a structure as well as the RTD, a testing system is designed and established, using a semiconductor parameter analyzer, an electronic scanning probe station and a Raman spectroscopy together with its fiber testing system. The piezoresistive properties of RTD and the accelerometer engaged RTD are detected. The experimental results demonstrate that the piezoresistive sensitivity of RTD is larger than 1 times 10^-8 Pa^-1, which is much higher than that of silicon piezoresistive property. While the piezoresistive sensitivity of the accelerometer engaged RTD is 2 times 10^-10 Pa^-1