High-stiffness driven micromechanical resonators with enhanced power handling

Abstract

A two-port silicon-based micromechanical beam resonator driven at its high-stiffness locations has been proposed with enhanced power handling as compared with the same resonator but using conventional drive/sense configurations. The key to attaining superior power handling relies on the electrode arrangements where critical handling power (or Duffing-nonlinear bifurcation power) becomes much higher by driving the resonator at its high-stiffness locations than low-stiffness areas. In this work, resonators using high-stiffness driving approach exhibit around 20 × (20 times) power handling improvement as compared to low-stiffness driving counterpart while the motional impedances in both cases are the same under linear operation. © 2012 American Institute of Physics.