Design of large-area metasurfaces for the mid-IR and suited for CMOS-compatible fabrication by masked lithography

The use of masked UV (i-line) lithography in a MEMS foundry for CMOS-compatible fabrication of large-area metasurface-based absorbers for the mid-infrared is demonstrated. The challenges are in: (a) the limited number of acceptable metals, (b) the thickness tolerance of the layers used in the CMOS process, and (c) the imaging capabilities of...

Maintaining transparency of a heated MEMs membrane for enabling long-term optical measurements on soot-containing exhaust gas

Ensuring optical transparency over a wide spectral range of a window with a view into the tailpipe of the combustion engine, while it is exposed to the harsh environment of sootcontaining exhaust gas, is an essential pre-requisite for introducing optical techniques for long-term monitoring of automotive emissions. Therefore, a regenerable...

Flow compensation in a MEMS dual-thermal conductivity detector for hydrogen sensing in natural gas

Conventional thermal conductivity detectors (TCDs) demonstrate a flow dependence. The approach presented here to reduce the flow dependence is based on the on-line flow compensation using two thin-film sensors on membranes in parallel on the same chip that are differentially operated. These are laterally identically, but with a different depth...

Closed-loop Operated Time-Based Accelerometer

A high-resolution, high dynamic range capacitive accelerometer based on pull-in time measurement is described in this paper. The high sensitivity of pull-in time can be used to implement high performance accelerometers, but non-linearity and low dynamic range compromise device performance. A closed-loop approach using an electrostatic actuation...

Squeeze-film damper design with air channels: Experimental verification

The experimental evaluation of damping-improved parallel-plate geometries is reported in this paper. An improved damper geometry with air channels was developed to address contradictory design constraints: large sensing parallel-plate area is desirable for a significant readout capacitance as well as reduced damping coefficient. Damping...