Abstract
This paper reviews CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems) fabrication technologies and enabled micro devices of various sensors and actuators. The technologies are classified based on the sequence of the fabrication of CMOS circuitry and MEMS elements, while SOI (silicon-on-insulator) CMOS MEMS are introduced separately. Introduction of associated devices follows the description of the respective CMOS MEMS technologies. Due to the vast array of CMOS MEMS devices, this review focuses only on the most typical MEMS sensors and actuators including pressure sensors, inertial sensors, frequency reference devices and actuators utilizing different physics effects and the fabrication processes introduced. Moreover, the incorporation of MEMS and CMOS is limited to monolithic integration, meaning wafer-bonding-based stacking and other integration approaches, despite their advantages, are excluded from the discussion. Both competitive industrial products and state-of-the-art research results on CMOS MEMS are covered.
Highlights
Last decade has seen the rapid maturity of the MEMS industry.MEMS are prevalent in our daily life
This paper summarizes a variety of CMOS MEMS monolithic integration technologies and associated devices that have made use of the respective technologies
In many of the CMOS MEMS devices fabricated using the process derived from the CMU approach, a large array of vias is placed as vertical electrodes when vertical capacitors are needed
Summary
Last decade has seen the rapid maturity of the MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems) industry. In the last couple of decades, with breakthroughs in individual technologies and enabling tools, great efforts have been made to integrate MEMS structures with integrated circuits (IC) on a single CMOS substrate, for the so-called monolithic CMOS MEMS integration. One of the pioneering efforts for CMOS MEMS transducers was made by H Baltes and his coworkers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH) [4]. They employed both wet bulk silicon micromachining and surface micromachining techniques in the fabrication of integrated CMOS MEMS devices. Due to the huge diversity of CMOS-MEMS integrated devices and systems, though other systems and associated technologies such as CMOS-bioMEMS devices and integration for fluid handling and analysis are emerging, as reported in references [6,7,8,9,10] and thereafter, only conventional MEMS devices, including a variety of physical sensors, resonators, and actuators, are used as examplesl featuring the respective CMOS MEMS technologies
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