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access icon free High-accuracy silicon-on-insulator accelerometer with an increased yield rate

© The Institution of Engineering and Technology
Received 12/08/2015, Accepted 28/08/2015, Published

This Letter presents a high accuracy silicon-on-insulator (SOI) capacitive accelerometer using a backside dry release process. To increase the yield rate of the process, the deep reactive iron etching (DRIE) process was improved using a grooved accompany wafer to balance the pressure inside the back cavity of the SOI devices. By using this method, almost all the devices after the DRIE will not crack. Thus, the yield rate is significantly increased. Furthermore, the DRIE process was improved by dividing the DRIE process into four stages to decrease the tilt angle of DRIE. It is experimentally demonstrated that the tilt angle of the side wall was decreased from 0.81° to 0.27° and the loss of the capacitive sensitivity caused by the error was decreased from 28 to 8%. Test results show that sensitivity, bias stability, and noise floor of the accelerometer is 3.1 V/g, 16 μg, and 3.1 μg/√Hz, respectively.

Inspec keywords: accelerometers; silicon; silicon-on-insulator; sputter etching; capacitive sensors; elemental semiconductors

Other keywords: Si; backside dry release process; deep reactive iron etching process; DRIE process; silicon-on-insulator capacitive accelerometer; SOI capacitive accelerometer

Subjects: Sensing and detecting devices; Velocity, acceleration and rotation measurement; Sensing devices and transducers; Velocity, acceleration and rotation measurement; Surface treatment (semiconductor technology); Corrosion, oxidation, etching, and other surface treatments

References

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http://iet.metastore.ingenta.com/content/journals/10.1049/mnl.2015.0341
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