Frequency Tunable MEMS-Based Timing Oscillators and Narrowband Filters

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission. There is little question that the commercial success of smartphones has substantially increased the volume of products utilizing Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology, especially accelerometers, gyroscopes, bandpass filters, and microphones. The Internet of Things (IoT), a more recent driver for small, low power microsystems, seems poised to provide an even bigger market for these and other potential products based on MEMS. Given that the IoT will likely depend heavily on massive sensor networks using nodes for which battery replacement might not be practical, cost and power consumption become even more important. As already known for existing sensor networks, sleep/wake cycles will likely be instrumental to maintaining low sensor node power consumption in the IoT, and if so, then the clocks that must continuously run to synchronize sleep/wake events often become the bottlenecks to ultimate power consumption. On the communications side, narrowband RF channel-selecting front-end filters stand to greatly reduce receive power consumption by relaxing transistor circuit dynamic ranges. Both the accuracy of the clocks and ability of filters to achieve bandwidths small enough to select individual channels depend heavily on the accuracy and precision to which the frequency-setting devices they rely on are constructed. Inevitably, fabrication tolerances are finite, which means the ability to attain the highest performance relies on trimming or tuning. This dissertation focuses on methods by which voltage-controlled frequency tuning of capacitively-transduced micromechanical resonators make possible 1) an ultra-compact, low-power 32.768-kHz micromechanical clock oscillator; and 2) a high-order, small percent bandwidth coupled-resonator filter with minimal passband distortion. Currently, quartz crystal-based oscillators at 32.768 kHz dominate the market because they offer the best combination of cost and performance. However, the physical dimensions of these oscillators are presently too large for future small form-factor electronic applications, such as ones that fit within credit cards. While there have been attempts to shrink quartz resonating elements, the increasingly difficult fabrication steps required to produce such devices raises manufacturing costs, thereby preventing widespread adoption (so far). In addition, quartz crystal motional resistance values …