CMOS co-integrated in-plane and out-of-plane MEMS sensors
(2011)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Raskin, Jean-Pierre
- Abstract
- (en) One word can summarize the 21st century electronics: the downscaling. The downscaling applies to the transistors dimensions, the power consumption and the package. The final objective is to produce miniaturized, long lifetime and cheap embedded applications required by customers. Coherent with this trend, this work demonstrates the monolithic integration of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) with integrated circuits: (i) a humidity sensor based on in-plane hydrophilic electrodes, and (ii) a flow sensor based on out-of-plane movable cantilevers. The road to success went through a fabrication using CMOS compatible techniques and materials, and a low power design based on a capacitive transduction. Concerning the humidity sensor, the sensitive area is made up of two electrodes covered with native or dense anodized aluminum oxide allowing wide range of conditions from dry air up to condensation of water. The humidity sensor was tested in hospital environment for detection of the hyperventilation in the breathing cycles of patients: water vapor condensates during expiration and evaporates during inspiration. Concerning the flow sensor, the sensitive area is made up out-of-plane movable MEMS allowing flow sensing by deflection of the out-of-plane components under different flow rates. The additional processing required by the built-in of out-of-plane cantilevers is reduced to the minimum thanks to the use of a standard CMOS materials and IC-respectful processing. The modeling of the residual curvature of the MEMS structure and the airflow-structure interactions are described. The presented microsystems can be seen as a key enabling technology for the fabrication of highly co-integrated low-power sensors, of the order of 1 μW, on a very small chip area.
- Affiliations
Citations
André, N. (2011). CMOS co-integrated in-plane and out-of-plane MEMS sensors. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/272207