Publications

A Micromachined Vibrating Ring Gyroscope

Michael William Putty
Khalil Najafi
Kensall D. Wise
Stella W. Pang
Noel Perkins
1995

A new micromachined gyroscope based on a vibrating ring is described. The device measures rotation rate or whole angle inertial rotation by monitorying the position of node lines in a vibrating ring. To sense rotation, the ring is electrostatically forced into an elliptically shaped vibration mode and the psoition of the node lines are capacitively monitored. When the device is rotated about the ring center, the node lines, lag behind the rotations due the the Coriolis force. The control and readout circuitry monitors this lag and develops a corrective voltage, that is proportional to the...

A MEMS Sensor for AC Electric Current

Eli Sidney Leland
Paul K. Wright
Richard M. White
Dennis K. Lieu
2009
This manuscript describes the development of a new MEMS sensor for the measurement of AC electric current. The sensor is comprised of a MEMS piezoelectric cantilever with a microscale permanent magnet mounted to the cantilever’s free end. When placed near a wire carrying AC current, the magnet couples to the oscillating magnetic field surrounding the wire, causing the cantilever to deflect, and piezoelectric coupling produces a sinusoidal voltage proportional to the current in the wire. The sensor is itself...

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 Large-Displacement Out-of-Plane SOI Actuator for Applications in Confocal Microscopy

Christopher Rulon Bowes-Lyon Ellis
Luke P. Lee
Roger T. Howe
2001

A silicon-on-insulator actuator has been designed for large DC deflections out of the plane of a wafer. The design employs deep reactive ion etching with a delay mask of two distinct silicon dioxide thicknesses to form silicon structures...

A CMOS Magnetic Sensor Chip for Biomedical Applications

Peng Liu
Bernhard E. Boser
Seth Sanders
Yuri Suzuki
2012

The growing need for pointofcare applications in global health and personalized medicine motivates a significant reduction in the size and cost of present technologies. Current solutions use fluorescent or enzymatic labels with complex optical instrumentation that has proven difficult to miniaturize. Recently, magnetic bead labeling has emerged as an alternative solution enabling portable and low...

Articulated Mechanisms and Electrostatic Actuators for Autonomous Microrobots

Richard Yeh
Kristofer S.J. Pister
Roger T. Howe
Dorian Liepmann
2001

Enabled by advances in both integrated circuit technology and micro electromechanical systems (MEMS), the continuing miniaturization and integration of electronics, sensors, and actuators and mechanisms will make it feasible to create insect-sized autonomous microrobots. We propose to create a class of autonomous crawling microrobots the size on the order f 1cm^3 and equipped with a power source, low-power CMOS controller, sensors, wireless communications devices and motorized articulated legs. The work presented here demonstrates how articulated insect legs could be created from rigid...

A Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) Device to Measure the Fracture Strain of Polycrystalline Silicon

Peter Truxtun Jones
Roger T. Howe
1995

The past decade has witnessed the establishment of a new field of technology concerned with the manufacture of microscopic sensors and actuators, known as Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems (MEMS). The field of MEMS is based on the use of integrated circuit fabrication techniques to create...

Miniature Gaseous Light Sources

Hsi-Jen Yeh
Richard S. Muller
Roger T. Howe
1991

This report describes miniature gas-filled plasma-discharge cavities fabricated using combined surface and subsurface micromachining. Starting with a bare silicon substrate, successive layers of polycrystalline silicon, low-stress silicon nitride, and low-temperature oxide layers were deposited to form the micro cavities. Polysilicon electrodes were patterned to serve as electrical connections to the gas. Low-stress silicon nitride formed the insulating layer and the cavity wall which confined neon at atmospheric pressure. Low-temperature oxide served as the sacrificial layer which defined...

Microstructure Micropackaging

Kristen M. McNair
Roger T. Howe
Richard M. White
1991

Two processes are developed to fabricate electrostatic comb drives hermetically encapsualted in a silicon nitride or polysilicon micropackage. To fabricate the silicon nitride micropackage, high-doped phosphosilicate glass is deposited, after the electrostatic comb-drive process is complete except for the release etch, and reflowed to form a mould for the silicon nitride microshell. The mould is patterned with a 5:1 BHF wet etch, and then the etch channel layer of phosphosilicate glass is deposited and patterned with a wt etch. The silicon nitride microshell layer is depositied, and holes...

Micromechanical Electrostatic Voltmeter

Charles Heng-Yuan Hsu
Richard S. Muller
Roger T. Howe
1991

A microminiature, noncontracting electrostatic voltmeter (ESV), produced by IC processes on a silicon wafer, is described. The ESV works on the principle of intermittent shuttering and exposing a sensing electrode to an electric field between a remote electrode at a different potential from the sensing electrode. The resultant time-varying field at the electrode produces an electrical signal. The principle of ESV measurements by intermittent shuttering is well establihsed and hybrid designs are presently used commerically. This invention teaches how the entire structure, and eventually the...