8B-1 1 -3

Silicon Fishbone-Shaped Resonant-Frequency-Tunable MEMS Resonator

Sho Makita'), Hiroshi Tanigawa2), and Kenichiro Suzuki1)

1) College of Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University 2) Research Organization of Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University
1-1-1 Noji-higashi, Kusatu, Shiga, 525-8577, Japan E-mail address: ksuzuki(se.ritsumei.acjp

1. INTRODUCTION

Rapid progress of wireless communication technology requires higher frequency and wider band-width and puts several strong requirements on mobile equipment. Because crystal quartz and SAW resonators cannot satisfy these requirements enough, MEMS-technology-based resonators have recently been paid a lot of attention on. MEMS resonators take advantages of higher directly-vibrating frequency and variable frequency-tuning as well as integration with electrical circuits on a same chip. In this paper, we present a newly-designed MEMS resonator and its first experimental results.
2. EXPERIMENTS

Figure 1 shows a fishbone-shaped silicon resonator. The silicon vibrating beam consists of a main beam with plural short beams and is set on a glass substrate. Some exciting electrodes are also formed near them. Figure 2 shows the excitation principle of this resonator. On applying a voltage to some of exciting electrodes, an electrostatic force is exerted on the short beams. Their deformation causes in-plane vibration of the main beam. Figure 3 shows the displacement amplitude of the main beam in the fishbone-shaped resonator at the first-order resonant frequency as a function of the overlapped electrode length of the short beams comparing with a fixed-fixed beam excited by the same voltage. It was found that the fishbone-shaped resonator can be vibrated in larger displacement with the increase of the overlapped length. The second feature of the fishbone-shaped resonator is variable resonant characteristic. The resonant characteristic has been simulated with CoventorWare. Figure 4 shows that the excitation of two electrodes can cause the fourth-order resonant mode of the main beam. Figures 5 and 6 show the normalized displacement amplitude for each resonant mode in the case of only a central electrode being excited and of two electrodes excited, respectively. The normalized displacement amplitude of the first-order mode is the maximum (3200) among frequency-dependent amplitudes for the one-electrode excitation. On the other hand, the displacement amplitude of the first-order mode is greatly suppressed and that of the second-order and fourth-order modes is increased for the two-electrode excitation. From this, it is expected that the fishbone-shaped resonator can change resonant characteristic by selecting the number and position among the formed exciting electrodes. The silicon structure is fabricated by using a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer with two masks. After the SOI wafer and a glass substrate are electrostatically bonded together, the backside silicon layer of the SOI wafer is etched by ion-coupled-plasma reactive-ion-etching (ICP-RIE) process and a buried-oxide layer is then etched away. Figure 7 shows a fabricated resonator device. The resonant characteristic of a fabricated resonator was measured by laser Doppler vibrometer (LDV). Figure 8 shows a measured out-of-plane vibration mode at the first-order resonant frequency. We will present measured results of the in-plane vibration mode at the conference.
3. SUMMARY We have designed and fabricated a silicon fishbone-shaped resonator. The resonator can vibrate in larger amplitude than conventional doubly-fixed-beam resonator and, more interestingly, resonant frequency characteristic is tunable by selectively choosing exciting electrodes. The dimension and resonant frequencies are summarized in Table 1. This new resonator should be useful for wider multi-band frequency applications, for example, reference oscillator of cellular phones and multi-band tunable filters, etc. This work was supported by Semiconductor Technology Academic Research Center (STARC).

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Table 1 Resonator characteristics

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