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A Lateral Piezoresistive Accelerometer with Epipoly Encapsulation Aaron Partridge Wednesday January 8th, 10:00 AM CISX Auditorium This thesis presents a new accelerometer topology that combines the advantages of obliquely implanted piezoresistors on flexure sidewalls and Deep Reactive Ion Etching (DRIE) with the Bosch process to form sensitive, robust, and tightly-caged structures that detect in-plane acceleration. In addition, a new encapsulation technique is demonstrated that protects the accelerometers from mechanical and environmental damage by enclosing them under a layer of epitaxially deposited polysilicon. These design and encapsulation methods produce high performance accelerometers while allowing conventional semiconductor post processing, such as dicing, wire bonding, and other standard handling and mounting techniques. More widely, these methods can be applied to solving many long standing problems in MEMS fabrication.