Soft chemistry assisted On-chip Integration of Nanostructured quartz-based Piezoelectric Microelectromechanical System

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel soft chemistry and top-down fabrication approach for integrating nanostructured quartz piezoelectric MEMS on silicon, enhancing sensitivity and scalability for sensing and frequency control applications.

Contribution

It introduces a new low-cost method combining chemical solution deposition and nanoimprint lithography to create nanostructured epitaxial quartz MEMS on silicon.

Findings

High force and mass sensitivity achieved

Mechanical quality factor preserved

Low-cost scalable fabrication demonstrated

Abstract

The development of advanced piezoelectric quartz MEMS for sensing and precise frequency control applications requires the nanostructuration and on chip integration on silicon of this material. However, the current quartz manufacturing methods are based on bonding bulk micromachined crystals on silicon, which limits the size, the performance, the integration cost and the scalability of quartz micro devices. Here, we combine chemical solution deposition, soft nanoimprint lithography and top down microfabrication processes to develop the first nanostructured epitaxial 100 quartz 100 Si piezoelectric cantilevers. The coherent Si quartz interface and film thinness combined with a controlled nanostructuration on silicon insulator silicon technology substrates provides high force and mass sensitivity while preserving the mechanical quality factor of the microelectromechanical systems. This work proves that biocompatible nanostructured epitaxial piezoelectric quartz based MEMS on silicon can be engineered at low cost by combining soft chemistry and top down lithographic techniques.