Fabrication of piezodriven, free-standing, all-oxide heteroepitaxial cantilevers on silicon

Abstract

We report on the fabrication and mechanical properties of all-oxide, free-standing, heteroepitaxial, piezoelectric, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) on silicon, using PbZr0.52Ti0.48O3 as the key functional material. The fabrication was enabled by the development of an epitaxial lift-off strategy for the patterning of multilayer oxide heterostructures grown on Si(001), employing a high temperature stable, sacrificial oxide template mask to obtain freestanding cantilever MEMS devices after substrate etching. All cantilevers, with lengths in the range 25-325 μm, width 50 μm, and total thickness of 300 nm, can be actuated by an external AC-bias. For lengths 50-125 μm, the second order bending mode formed the dominant resonance, whereas for the other lengths different or multiple modes were present.