Albert P. Pisano (Advisor)

A High-Voltage Charge Pump in Bulk CMOS

Eugene Lau Cheung
Bernhard Boser
Albert P. Pisano
1996

The goal of this project is to investigate a circuit for generating 80V in a bulk CMOS technology. This voltage is needed for powering a micromachined electrostatic actuator, and it must be generated from a 5V ...

A MEMS Thin Film AlN Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Valve

Ya-Mei Chen
Albert P. Pisano
Liwei Lin
Tsu-Jae King Liu
Tarek Zohdi
2011
In this thesis, a new piezoelectric valve system with bi-chevron aluminum nitride (AlN) actuator is described. The intended application of the new piezoelectric valve is for the advanced printing technology with supercritical carbon dioxide as the solvent. With supercritical carbon dioxide as the solvent, the ink dissolved will start to nucleate with a micronozzle and generate extremely small and uniform ink particles due to rapid expansion of supercritical...

A Silicon-Based Microsensor to Measure Airborne Contaminants

Bharat M. Shah
Richard M. White
Albert P. Pisano
1994

In this reseach project the ability of a microfabricated acoustic-wave microsensor to detect volatile organic compounds in indoor air was studied. The microsensors were made in the Berkeley Microfabrication facility following designs developed at the Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center. The devices were exposed in a four-liter chamber to vapor-phase concentrations of six representative VOCs one at a time: tetrachloroethylene, 1,1,1-trichloroethane, toluene, benzene, ethanol, and formaldehyde. The device sesnitivity to each VOC was computed from the measured oscillator frequency and...

BPN442: MEMS Poly/Nano: Multifunctional Nanowire Sensor for Physiological pH and Oxygen Sensing

Sun Choi
2010

The long range goal of this project is to develop a multifunctional silicon nanowire array sensor in microfluidic system for real-time detection of physiological parameters such as pH level and oxygen concentration dissolved in the aqueous environment. The sensing targets include the medium of cultured mammalian cells or microbial species such as bacteria. During certain types of metabolism processes of these biological species, extracellular environment will experience changes of pH levels and oxygen concentration. Our goal is to design nanowire array sensor which can be integrated...

BPN366: SiC TAPS: Pressure Sensor Design and Optimization

Benjamin Cheng
2010

The goal of this work is to deliver a sensor module with MEMS-based silicon carbide TAPS sensors integrated with SiC interface circuits for extreme harsh environment applications.

Project end date: 08/13/10

Gimballed Electrostatic Microactuators with Embedded Interconnects

Lilac Muller
Albert P. Pisano
Roger T. Howe
Kristofer S.J. Pister
2005
A microgimbal with an integrated in-plane electrostatic microactuator was designed, fabricated, and tested. The microgimbal structure provided pitch and roll compliance between the microactuator and ground, and thus offered mechanical isolation from external disturbances, such as vibration and temperature variations. ...

Micromechanical Power Conversion

J. Mark Noworolski
Seth Sanders
Roger T. Howe
Albert P. Pisano
1998

A new concept in power conversion, based on electromechanical energy storage, is developed. Mechanical energy storage using Silicon offers a 2 order of magnitude improvement in volumetric energy storage density over conventional approaches using...

Biological Applications of Micromachined Ultrasonic Flexural Plate-Wave Technology

Audra Hsien-I Meng
Richard M. White
Rajendra Bhatnagar
Albert P. Pisano
1999
The micromachined acoustic flexural plate-wave (FPW) device has many applications in biological research and medical diagnostics. In order to safely use the FPW device for these applications, we studied the effects of ultrasound produced with the device on biological...

Design, Fabrication, and Optimization of Micromechanical Flexures

Young-Ho Cho
Albert P. Pisano
Roger T. Howe
1990

In this dissertation are described two types of micromechanical flexures for guiding mov- able micromechanical structures with applications to high-precision Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS), whose typical sizes are in the order of ...

Design and Fabrication of PZT-Actuated Silicon Suspensions for Hard Disk Drives

Tsung-Lin Chen
Roberto Horowitz
Roger T. Howe
Albert P. Pisano
2001
Piezoelectrically actuated suspensions are currently being considered by the magneticrecording industry, as a means of achieving dual-stage actuation in magnetic Hard Disk Drives. In most designs, piezoelectric actuators are ...