Ultra-stable epitaxial polysilicon resonators

Abstract

Epitaxially grown polycrystalline silicon (epi-poly) has shown great promise as a MEMS material, offering isotropic material properties with minimal residual stress and stress gradients. While epi-poly has been used previously for MEMS inertial systems or sensors, its use in high precision resonator applications has been restricted to an encapsulation layer for resonators fabricated in single crystal silicon. In this work, encapsulated resonators fabricated with epi-poly as the functional layer were tested alongside single crystal silicon devices with regard to resonant frequency, quality factor, temperature dependence, and stability. Test results indicate that epi-poly resonators have very similar mechanical properties and stability to single crystal silicon resonators when operated in a clean package.