Self-heating in piezoresistive cantilevers

Optimization of sensitivity and noise in piezoresistive cantilevers

An Analytical Model of Joule Heating in Piezoresistive Microcantilevers

The present study investigates Joule heating in piezoresistive microcantilever sensors. Joule heating and thermal deflections are a major source of noise in such sensors. This work uses analytical and numerical techniques to characterise the Joule heating in 4-layer piezoresistive microcantilevers made of silicon and silicon dioxide substrates but with the same U-shaped silicon piezoresistor. A...

Piezoresistive AFM cantilevers surpassing standard optical beam deflection in low noise topography imaging

Optical beam deflection (OBD) is the most prevalent method for measuring cantilever deflections in atomic force microscopy (AFM), mainly due to its excellent noise performance. In contrast, piezoresistive strain-sensing techniques provide benefits over OBD in readout size and the ability to image in light-sensitive or opaque environments, but traditionally have worse noise performance. Miniatur...

On the design of piezoresistive silicon cantilevers with stress concentration regions for scanning probe microscopy applications

In this paper, the design of silicon based cantilevers for scanning probe microscopy has been described in detail. ANSYS software has been used as a tool to design and model the mechanical properties of the silicon based cantilevers. The incorporation of stress concentration regions (SCRs) with a thickness smaller than the cantilever thickness, to localize stresses, has been explored in detail ...

Design of Piezoresistive Silicon Cantilevers with Stress Concentration Region (SCR) for Scanning Probe Microscopy (SPM) Applications

This paper describes and evaluates the incorporation of novel Stress Concentration Region (SCR) in silicon based cantilevers to enhance piezoresistive displacement, force, and torque sensitivities. In brief, SCR is a region, on the cantilever, with a thickness smaller than the cantilever thickness and of an appropriate length to localize stress where piezoresistors are implanted. It was found t...