Si-based unreleased hybrid MEMS-CMOS resonators in 32nm technology

This work presents the first unreleased Silicon resonators fabricated at the transistor level of a standard CMOS process, and realized without any release steps or packaging. These unreleased bulk acoustic resonators are driven capacitively using the thin gate dielectric of the CMOS process, and actively sensed with a Field Effect Transistor (FET) incorporated into the resonant body. FET sensing using the high f
_T
, high performance transistors in CMOS amplifies the mechanical signal before the presence of parasitics. This enables RF-MEMS resonators at orders of magnitude higher frequencies than possible with passive devices. First generation CMOS-MEMS Si resonators with Acoustic Bragg Reflectors are demonstrated at 11.1 GHz with Q~17 and a total footprint of 5μm × 3μm using IBM's 32nm SOI technology.