Monolithic Integration Fabrication Process of Thermoelectric and Vibrational Devices for Microelectromechanical System Power Generator

This paper describes a fabrication process to integrate different types of energy-converting microelectromechanical system (MEMS) devices for a power generator. MEMS structures and a fabrication process for the monolithic integration are proposed for the purpose of accumulating small amounts of energy from various surrounding environments. For the MEMS power generator, thermocouples and movable plates are simultaneously fabricated in thick-film formation processes with deep reactive ion etching of silicon and gold electroplating. The fabricated thermoelectric devices of gold and silicon produced voltages in accordance with the temperature difference at the thermocouples. The vibrational devices with gold movable plates resonated with external vibrations. These results confirm that the monolithic integration process of MEMS devices can be established for harvesting thermal and vibrational energies from their surroundings.