Microfabrication of gallium arsenide cantilever for atomic force microscope application

Recently, several researchers have reported fabrications of cantilever based on various GaAs related bulk and hetrostructure materials. But the details of fabrication processes and of mechanical properties have not yet been reported so far. In this work, we report fabrication and estimation of full GaAs cantilever for use of scanning probe microscopy. The process was accomplished only by photo-lithography and two-kind wet chemical etching. As a result, almost one third of die samples had a perfect appearance as designed. For those samples, we made resonance frequency measurement by using laser vibrometer and found a good agreement with the calculation. We also tried atomic force microscopy (AFM) observations by using this cantilever and obtained equal images to those by commercial Si cantilever.