Fragmented membrane MEM bulk lateral resonators with nano-gaps on 1.5μm SOI

The design, fabrication and experimental investigation of 21 MHz MEM bulk lateral resonators (BLR) on 1.5 mum silicon-on-insulator (SOI) fragmented membranes with 100 nm air-gaps are reported. Quality factors as high as 33'000 are measured under vacuum at room temperature, with 20 V DC bias and low AC-power. The influence of temperature on the resonance frequency and quality factor is studied and discussed from 80 K and 380 K. A very high quality factor of 182'000 and a motional resistance of 165 kOmega, are reported at 80 K. The paper shows that high-quality factor MEM resonator can be integrated on partially-depleted thin SOI, which demonstrates the possibility of making full-integrated hybrid MEM-CMOS integrated circuits for future communication applications.