Silicon carbide-on-insulator thermal-piezoresistive resonator for harsh environment application

The thermal-piezoresistive effect in silicon (Si) has attracted great attention toward high-performance resonant devices but still faces major challenges for harsh environment applications. Instead of using Si, this paper, for the first time, reports a thermal-piezoresistive resonator based on a silicon carbide-on-insulator (SiCOI) platform. The...

Degradation of silicone-based sealing materials used in microelectronics

Adhesive bonding is a key joining technology in many industrial applications, including automotive, aerospace industries, biomedical devices, and microelectronic components. Adhesive bonding is gaining more and more attention due to the increasing demand for joining similar or dissimilar components, mostly within the framework of designing...

In-situ reliability monitoring of power packages using a Thermal Test Chip

With an increasing demand for high-power electronics, the need to meet stringent automotive norms and better understand the critical failure mechanisms are crucial in order to improve their reliablity. To that end, we developed an in-situ reliability monitoring setup capable of actively measuring the thermal performance of the package during...

High-resolution MEMS inertial sensor combining large-displacement buckling behaviour with integrated capacitive readout

Commercially available gravimeters and seismometers can be used for measuring Earth’s acceleration at resolution levels in the order of ng∕Hz (where g represents earth’s gravity) but they are typically high-cost and bulky. In this work the design of a bulk micromachined MEMS device exploiting non-linear buckling behaviour is described, aiming...

Designing a 100 [aF/nm] capacitive transducer

The mechanical part of inertial sensors can be designed to have a large mechanical sensitivity, but also requires the transduction mechanism which translates this displacement. The overall system resolution in mechanical inertial sensors is dictated by the noise contribution of each stage and the magnitude of each sensitivity, see also Figure...