Nanorez - A Miniaturised MEMS based resonator

Resonator technology using quartz crystals has been the mainstay of the timing market for many decades. It has advantages in terms of temperature stability and high quality factor that translates to low phase noise of oscillators built on quartz. However, quartz has some significant disadvantage particularly, in terms of size, manufacturing cost, operation frequency and shock/vibration sensitivity. MEMS resonator technology is an emerging trend that has the capability to rapidly displace quartz technology in a large number of applications due to its lower fabrication cost, form factor and superior reliability [1,]. This paper reports on the first generation of "Piezo-on-Silicon" MEMS-based resonator technology being developed in Tyndall. The resonator is designed to operate in Lamb Wave (So) operation mode at 100 MHz frequency that is excited by means of Interdigital Transducer (IDT). The resonator uses 0.5um thick Aluminium Nitride (AlN) as the piezoelectric material and is built on 10um thick silicon block supported by two suspending beams. The device fabrication process is based on the SOI substrate.