Thin Film Encapsulation for LCP-Based Flexible Bioelectronic Implants: Comparison of Different Coating Materials Using Test Methodologies for Life-Time Estimation

Liquid crystal polymer (LCP) has gained wide interest in the electronics industry largely due to its flexibility, stable insulation and dielectric properties and chip integration capabilities. Recently, LCP has also been investigated as a biocompatible substrate for the fabrication of multielectrode arrays. Realizing a fully implantable LCP...

Mechanical Robustness and Hermeticity Monitoring for MEMS Thin Film Encapsulation

Many Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems (MEMS) require encapsulation, to prevent delicate sensor structures being exposed to external perturbations such as dust, humidity, touching, and gas pressure. An upcoming and cost-effective way of encapsulation is zero-level packaging or thin-film encapsulation. With this method, MEMS are already sealed...

PECVD silicon carbide surface micromachining technology and selected MEMS applications

Attractive material properties of plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposited (PECVD) silicon carbide (SiC) when combined with CMOS-compatible low thermal budget processing provides an ideal technology platform for developing various microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) devices and merging them with integrated circuits. In this paper we present a...

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...