Micromachines (Jan 2018)

Investigation on the Quality Factor Limit of the (111) Silicon Based Disk Resonator

  • Xin Zhou,
  • Dingbang Xiao,
  • Qingsong Li,
  • Qian Hu,
  • Zhanqiang Hou,
  • Kaixuan He,
  • Zhihua Chen,
  • Chun Zhao,
  • Yulie Wu,
  • Xuezhong Wu,
  • Ashwin Seshia

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/mi9010025
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 9, no. 1
p. 25

Abstract

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Quality factor is one of the most important parameters for a MEMS resonator. Most MEMS resonators are dominated by thermoelastic dissipation (TED). This paper demonstrates that the TED in a disk resonator that is made of (111) single-crystal silicon is surpassed by clamping loss. The stiffness-mass decoupling design method, combined with reducing the beam width, was used to engineer high QTED. Experiments show that Q of the (111) disk resonator have an upper boundary that is determined by the clamping loss caused by the unbalanced out-of-plane displacement. The origin of the out-of-plane displacement is explained by theory and simulation.

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