Design of a silicon photonic microphone

In a world increasingly dominated by technological advancements, the demand for high-quality microphones has never been more present. Seamless speech recognition and the development of userfriendly hearing aids remain significant challenges. State-of-the-art micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) microphones are reaching their bottlenecks in...

Surface-micromachined Silicon Carbide Pirani Gauges for Harsh Environments

The application of pressure sensors in harsh environments is typically hindered by the stability of the material over long periods of time. This work focuses on the design and fabrication of surface micromachined Pirani gauges which are designed to be compatible with state-of-the-art Silicon Carbide CMOS technology. Such an integrated...

From Silicon toward Silicon Carbide Smart Integrated Sensors

Toward a Self-Sensing Piezoresistive Pressure Sensor for all-SiC Monolithic Integration

This work focusses on the design and fabrication of surface micromachined pressure sensors, designed in a modular way for the integration with analog front-end read-out electronics. Polycrystalline 3C silicon carbide (SiC) was used to fabricate free-standing high topography cavities exploiting surface micromaching. The poly-SiC was in-situ...

Monolithic integration of silicon and polymer microstructures for Organ-on-Chip applications

Drug development is a complex, time-consuming (10 - 15 years) and expensive process. For a new medicine to reach the market, the net expenses covered by the pharmaceutical industry have been estimated to be around $2.6 billion. Nevertheless, the risk of finding adverse effects or toxicity cases once the drug is already on the market is still...

A porous silicon carbide ammonia sensor

Large scale industries like automobile, agriculture and poultry etc.. are in the need of a reliable technology for gas sensors. Till date various types of sensors have been developed for gas applications but the SiC gas sensing has been a recent trend. With increase study in MEMS technology, the SiC material is gaining importance for sensor...

Metal and Polymeric Strain Gauges for Si-based, Monolithically Fabricated Organs-on-Chips

Organ-on-chip (OOC) is becoming the alternative tool to conventional in vitro screening. Heart-on-chip devices including microstructures for mechanical and electrical stimulation have been demonstrated to be advantageous to study structural organization and maturation of heart cells. This paper presents the development of metal and polymeric...

Measuring plastic deformation of silicon as a result of thermal oxidation

Thermal oxidation in silicon microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) induces stress in the oxide film and silicon. Such residual stresses are usually unwanted, as it can influence performance or damage components. It can also cause unwanted plastic deformation in silicon, as was observed in previous research. Currentmeasurement methods inMEMSare...

Optimization of LPCVD-SiNx Membranes for Micro-hotplate/Nano-reactors

Micro-hotplate and Micro-hotplate integrated Nano-reactors are a revolution for in-situ observations in Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) imaging. They currently operate at about 400oC without any problems. The SiNx membranes of micro-hotplate and Nano-reactors have integrated micro-heater along with electron transparent windows. The major...

Post-release deformation and motion control of photonic waveguide beams by tuneable electrothermal actuators in thick SiO₂

Photonic packaging, which includes high-precision assembly of photonic sub-systems, is currently a bottleneck in the development of commercially-available integrated photonic products. In the pursuit of a fully-automated, high-precision, and cost-effective photonic alignment scheme for two multi-channel photonic chips, this paper explores...

An Evaluation of Silicon Carbide Based Bimorph Actuators for Optical Coherence Tomography Applications

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) probes rely on MEMS micro-scanners to provide fast and reproducible scans covering as much area as possible. A popular choice of actuators employed in this role are electrothermal bimorph actuators. They comprise of two layers of different materials which are rigidly joined together. Differential expansion...

Silicon carbide thin films for MEMS nanoreactors for in-situ transmission electron microscopy

Micro-Fluidic MEMS for Micro-Particle Filtration

Recently there has been an onset of fluidic filters fabricated using micro electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technology. These filters, compared to conventional ones, are more accurate and precise due to the highly sophisticated techniques that are used to define and implement the separation mechanism. In order to contribute to this new field of...

MEMS monocrystalline-silicon based thermal devices for chemical and microfluidic applications

This thesis explores the employment of monocrystalline silicon in microsystems as an active material for different thermal functions, such as heat generation and heat transfer by conduction. In chapter 1 applications that need thermal micro devices, micro heaters and micro heat exchangers, are briefly introduced. The shortcomings of commonly...

Silicon MEMS Micro-Evaporator

Robust Wafer-Level Thin-Film Encapsulation (Packaging) of Microstructures (MEMS) using Low Stress PECVD Silicon Carbide

This paper presents a new low-cost, CMOS-compatible and robust wafer-level encapsulation technique developed using a stress-optimised PECVD SiC as the capping and sealing material, imparting harsh environment capability. This technique has been applied for the fabrication and encapsulation of a wide variety of surface- and thin-SOI...

SOI Digital Accelerometer Based on Pull-in Time Configuration

The operation principle, design, fabrication and measurement results of a quasi digital accelerometer fabricated on a thin silicon-on-insulator (SOI) substrate is presented. The accelerometer features quasi-digital output, therefore eliminating the need for analogue signal conditioning. The accelerometer can be directly interfaced to digital...