Publications

MEMS Development for In-Cylinder Combustion Monitoring

S. Wodin-Schwartz
Albert P. Pisano
2010

Silicon carbide (SiC) is often proposed as a sensor material for use in harsh environment applications such as monitoring gas turbines and internal combustion engines. However, little SiC survivability research has been reported for these environments. In the first half of this work, exposure testing results are reported for silicon and amorphous silicon carbide (a-SiC) coated Si die tested within a combustion engine with an exhaust temperature of 800 degrees C. It was found that an oil residue was deposited on the test samples, the surfaces of both sample types were roughened, and no...

Electrochemical Gas Generation for Cell Culture

Michel M. Maharbiz
Roger T. Howe
Jay D. Keasling
Richard M. White
2007
A scalable array technology for parametric control of high-throughput cell cultivations is demonstrated. Central to this cell culture array is a silicon microfabricated electrolytic oxygen generator. The generator consists of Ti/Pt electrodes patterned at the narrow end of conical hydrophilic silicone microchannels filled...

Xenon Difluoride Etching of Silicon for MEMS

Floy I-Jung Chang
Kristofer S.J. Pister
1995

Xenon difluoride (XeF2) is a dry, isotropic gas-phase etchant which gently etches silicon at room temperature. Silicon dioxide and photoresist can be used as mask materials for XeF2 etching. XeF2 is also extremely selective to many metals, including...

Toward A Levitated Micromechanical Resonator

Ilya Gurin
Clark T.-C. Nguyen
Liwei Lin
2010

Capacitive micromechanical (MEMS) resonators promise to dramatically improve the design of RF frontends for wireless communications by virtue of their high quality factor (Q). Unfortunately, the physical limitations of MEMS resonators’ Q are poorly understood, and the highest Qs have proven difficult to achieve reliably. In order to further...

The Damping Mechanism in Single-Ended Tuning Fork Resonant Structures

Gonnan K. Leung
Roger T. Howe
1995

The damping in micromechanical single ended tuning fork resonators are investigated. Analytical models are built to simulate the effects of end damping, as in the case of an anchor, and material damping on the...

Textile Supercapacitor for Wearable Energy Storage

Dongwoo Shin
Liwei Lin
Samuel Mao
2018
In today’s world, portable electronics are an integral part of our lives. For example, with a mobile phone, we wake up in the morning, read the news, communicate, send and receive emails, listen to music, diagnose health issues and capture important fleeting moments in photos and videos. We no longer carry heavy stacks of documents and books but hold on to our laptop and wear an electronic watch not merely to know the time, but to monitor and record our health in realtime even while...

Temperature-Compensated Aluminium Nitride Lamb Wave Resonator Performance Study

Damien Wittwer
Albert P. Pisano
2010

The generation of a precise and stable reference frequency with low drift and phase noise is a need for electronic products as navigation systems, wireless communication devices or multimedia applications. Recent researches proved that Lamb wave resonators (LWR) made of aluminium nitride (AlN) piezoelectric material is the best technology in term of high resonance frequencies multiplex (from 100MHz to 1GHz), high quality factor (up to 2000)...

The Optimal Kinematic Synthesis of Planar, Full Cycle, Constant-Velocity, Straight-Line Mechanisms

Peter Hall Hodges
Albert P. Pisano
1991

This thesis addresses the optimal kinematic synthesis of planar, full cycle, constant velocity, straight-line mechanisms. Exact and approximate straight line generating mechansisms in the literature were analyzed for their constatnt-velocity characteristcs. Some exact straight-line mechanisms depending on special link length ratios or on the principle of inversion, are shown to not have constant-velocity charactertists, wtih uniform input velocity. Mechanisms that were found to have constant-velocity characteristics include: the Chebychev cognate four bar (Spragg and Tesar, 1972...

The Wankel Engine and Fuel-Flexibility: An Engine Performance Review

John Réville
Albert P. Pisano
Carlos Fernandez-Pello
2009

In a time where demand for autonomous mobile devices is sharply increasing, we turn our attention to the systems available to power them and discover that many do not meet the requirements and technology breakthroughs appear to be much in need. We find that the Wankel engine shows very good potential as a fuel-flexible power source and we locate its current and potential positions on a Ragone diagram and compare it to various other power sources. We then discuss...

Thermally-Driven Angular Rate Sensors in Standard CMOS

Michael Dean Pottenger
1995

The complete design cycle for micromachined angular rate sensors is presented. Original analysis is combined with previously published results culled from a diverse spectrum of sources, and form a complete treament of the pertinent design issues. Main functional components (actuator, oscillating mass, transducer and interface circuit) are introduced with desgin analysis and methodologies, and the dependence of component and sensor performance on operating frequency is discussed in detail. System-level issues such as electrical noise, mechanical and thermal error sources, and the use of...