An Ultrasensitive Cmos-Mems Tuned-Mass-Damper (Tmd) Based Voltmeter

An ultrasensitive micromechanical voltmeter has been demonstrated, for the first time, using tuned-mass-damper (TMD) based mode-localized structure in a CMOS-MEMS process. Particularly, a 0.35-µm CMOS-MEMS based micromechanical clamped-clamped resonator with miniaturized cantilever beams attached aside, which serve as anti-resonating-TMD structures, yields deviations in resonance frequency as high as −3376 ppm/V, when applying a voltage to modify the stiffness of the TMD cantilevers. With a sensitivity on par with that reports in [1], this work presents a much simpler structural design with a 10× smaller footprints thanks to the use of miniaturized TMD structures on a single resonator, instead of two or more identical weakly-coupled ones used in the conventional mode-localized structures [2]. The miniaturized acceptors, which has smaller effective mass and stiffness compared to the conventional counterparts, would response a larger mode localization effect for a certain amount of perturbation.