MEMS Resonator Project Ideas for EECS 245/ME 219
Sunil Bhave ()
Few people have inquired about project ideas on MEMS resonators for the EECS 245 class project. Prof. Clark Nguyen (ex-Prof. Howe’s PhD student) and his group (Ark-Chew Wong, Wan-Thai Hsu and John Clark) at University of Michigan have done pioneering work in design and fabrication of MEMS resonators. An incomplete list of their papers is at http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~ctnguyen/publications.html
More recent papers can be found on the IEEE and Inspec databases. There are also papers from the Ayazi group at Gatech and the Howe group here at BSAC as well.
Current research in MEMS resonators is focused on 3 things:
· New resonator designs for GHz frequency range with lower motional impedance
o John Clark’s paper (ref#11)
o Abdelmoneum’s paper at MEMS 2003
o Brian Bircumshaw’s paper at Transducers 2003
· Techniques for tuning the resonant frequency of GHz MEMS resonator
o Ark-Chew Wong’s paper (ref#21)
o Wan-Thai Hsu’s paper at MEMS 2002
o Thermal heating stuff by Professor Lewei Lin and Al Pisano
· Mechanical and Electrical coupling to form filters
o Ark-Chew’s papers
o Frank Bannon’s paper (ref#42)
o Sivash’s paper (Pourkamali and Ayazi) at MEMS 2003
Another topic of current interest is to investigate which transduction scheme is the most optimal as we try to scale these resonators further to 10s of GHz. Tomi Mattila at VTT has shown that electrostatics is not any worse than Piezo at 10s of MHz. But FBARs are already in the market, whereas electrostatically transduced resonators are not. So it would be very insightful to find the cross-over point where we have no choice but to go piezo.
The class project should ideally contain some theory, simulation results and a GDS file of an array of test structures drawn in Intellisuite or Cadence. So design problems like the first 3 are more interesting than the transduction efficiency question. However, if you put in enough effort, even that can be very rewarding, insightful and publishable.