Design, fabrication, and characterization of surface micromachined MEMS cantilever components

Microelectromechanical System (MEMS) and microfabrication have experienced phenomenal growth over the past few years, and have had tremendous impact on and have also led to major breakthroughs in information technology, computers, medicine, health, manufacturing, transportation, energy, avionics, security, etc. Development of MEMS is multiphysics in nature and is based upon fundamental theory, engineering practice, and leading edge technologies in fabrication of microscale systems, subsystems, devices, and structures which have dimensions of micrometers. The leading edge basic research, novel technologies, software, and hardware are integrated based on multidisciplinary phenomena, complex processes, and compatibility to devise new systems and study existing systems, and provide researchers, engineers, and students with the needed concurrent design of integrated MEMS. This paper presents fundamental processes including design, analysis, fabrication, packaging, test, and characterization of surface micromachined MEMS cantilevers for RF MEMS switches or biomedical sensors. First, key issues in mechanical, material, electromagnetic, thermodynamic, vibroacoustic, and other fields are modeled, simulated, analyzed, and optimized in design and analysis of MEMS component. Then, microfabrication of MEMS cantilever beams is addressed and studied with the emphasis on optimizing the processes in lithography, thin film deposition, etching, and packaging. Finally, characterization of MEMS cantilevers based on the state-of-the-art optoelectronic measurements of the dynamic response is presented to illustrate performance of a component. In addition, supporting multiphysics computational modeling will be compared and correlated with experimental results for optimizing performance of the MEMS components.