Resonating cantilever mass sensor with mechanical on-plane excitation

The aim of this paper is to report the experimental setup designed, developed and tested in order to achieve the first vibrating mode of a lateral cantilever with mechanical excitation. The on-plane oscillating cantilever is the basis of a proposed mass sensor with an expected resolution in the atto-gram scale. In a first system design, the cantilever is driven electrostatically by an electrode, which is placed parallel to the cantilever. The cantilever is driven to its first resonant mode applying an AC voltage between the cantilever and a driver. Also, a DC voltage is applied to increase the system response. The signal read-out of the transducer is the capacitive current of the cantilever-driver system. The mass sensor proposed, based on this cantilever-driver structure (CDS), is integrated with a CMOS circuitry in order to minimize the parasitic capacitances, that in this case take special relevance because of the low level output current coming from the transducer. Moreover, the electrostatic excitation introduces a parasitic current that overlaps the current due to the resonance. The mechanical excitation is an alternative excitation method which aim is to eliminate the excitation current. Here we describe the experimental facilities developed to achieve mechanical excitation and report preliminary results obtained by this excitation technique. The results are complemented with dynamic simulations of an equivalent system model that are in accordance with the experimental values.