Download A Lateral Piezoresistive Accelerometer with Epipoly Encapsulation Aaron Partridge

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.