June 19, 2014 at 12:00 p.m. EST
Although Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) have been around for a long time, the introduction of the technology into consumer markets, with Nintendo’s Wii in late 2006, opened the floodgates with multiple MEMS – accelerometers, gyros, compasses, pressure sensors and microphones — now in smartphones and tablets. And you ain’t seen nothing, yet!
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Presenter: Jay Esfandyari, Director of MEMS and Analog Product Marketing at STMicroelectronics
Presenter: Simone Severi, lead for SiGe MEMS at imec
SiGe MEMS technology for monolithic integration on CMOS
Recent development of MEMS technologies at IMEC enables the monolithic integration of MEMS on CMOS. This approach represents a potential key advantage for a variety of MEMS systems as it can lead to a device performance improvement and to the scaling of the system area with consequent cost and package size reduction. Systems requiring multiple MEMS devices on chip or large MEMS array will benefit the most out of this approach.
One route focuses on the direct post processing on top of CMOS of a low temperature SiGe material, fully compatible with standard Al back end of line processes. This platform can realize a compact system for multi sensing applications. Accelerometers, capacitive pressure, compass and temperature sensors are among the candidate sensors to be combined on the same chip, e.g., to yield implantable (or wearable) products for the medical field, chips for the consumer or automotive market. Array of Capacitive Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers are demonstrated for potential medical imaging systems. Key asset for the success of this CMOS-MEMS monolithic approach is the implementation of an hermetic thin film packaging technology. Thin film hermetic SiGe packages are demonstrated with cavity pressure ranging from few Pa up to several 100mBar. This technology has the potential to enable a scaling of the form factors while reducing packaging and testing costs.
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