Piezoresistive transduction in multilayer polycrystalline silicon resonators

We demonstrate piezoresistive transduction of mechanical motion from out-of-plane flexural micromechanical resonators made from stacked thin films. The resonators are fabricated from two highly doped polycrystalline silicon layers separated by an interlayer dielectric. We examine two interlayer mate...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied physics letters 2009-09, Vol.95 (13), p.133113-133113-3
Main Authors: Cross, J. D., Ilic, B. R., Zalalutdinov, M. K., Zhou, W., Baldwin, J. W., Houston, B. H., Craighead, H. G., Parpia, J. M.
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:We demonstrate piezoresistive transduction of mechanical motion from out-of-plane flexural micromechanical resonators made from stacked thin films. The resonators are fabricated from two highly doped polycrystalline silicon layers separated by an interlayer dielectric. We examine two interlayer materials: thermal silicon dioxide and stoichiometric silicon nitride. We show that via one-time dielectric breakdown, the film stack functions as a vertical piezoresistor effectively transducing the motion of the resonators. We obtain a gauge factor of ∼ 5 , which is sufficient to detect the resonator motion. The simple film stack constitutes a vertically oriented piezoresistor that is readily integrated with micro- and nanoscale resonators.
ISSN:0003-6951
1077-3118
DOI:10.1063/1.3241077