Fully encapsulated sub-millimeter accelerometers

Author

Park, Woo-Tae ; Candler, Rob N. ; Ayanoor-Vitikkate, Vipin ; Lutz, Markus ; Partridge, Aaron ; Yama, Gary ; Kenny, Thomas W.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. Eng., Stanford Univ., CA, USA

fYear

2005

fDate

30 Jan.-3 Feb. 2005

Firstpage

347

Lastpage

350

Abstract

In this paper we present design, fabrication, and characterization results for the smallest published fully-packaged accelerometers. The miniaturization is realized by utilizing an advanced packaging scheme using a thick film epitaxial grown polysilicon encapsulation technique. Using this approach, released, encapsulated MEMS devices can be fabricated with exterior dimensions only 10s of microns larger than the micromechanical element. This advantage enables us to make accelerometers almost 2 orders of magnitude smaller than others. We have fabricated accelerometers as small as 0.034mm³ (387×387×230μm) with noise floor of 0.25mg/sqrt(Hz).

Keywords

accelerometers; electronics packaging; encapsulation; epitaxial growth; microsensors; advanced packaging scheme; encapsulated MEMS devices; fully encapsulated sub-millimeter accelerometers; fully-packaged accelerometers; thick film epitaxial grown polysilicon encapsulation technique; Accelerometers; Ear; Encapsulation; Microelectromechanical devices; Micromechanical devices; North America; Packaging; Piezoresistance; Thick films; Vibrations;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Micro Electro Mechanical Systems, 2005. MEMS 2005. 18th IEEE International Conference on

ISSN

1084-6999

Print_ISBN

0-7803-8732-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/MEMSYS.2005.1453938

Filename

1453938