A CMOS Compatible MEMS Pirani Vacuum Gauge with Monocrystal Silicon Heaters and Heat Sinks

We present a micro-Pirani vacuum gauge using the low-resistivity monocrystal silicon as the heaters and heat sinks fabricated by the post complementary metal oxide semiconductor （CMOS） microelectromechanical system （MEMS） process. The metal interconnection of the device is fabricated by a 0.5 μm standard CMOS process on 8-inch silicon wafer. Then, a SiO2-Si low-temperature fusion bonding is developed to bond the CMOS wafer and the MEMS wafer, with the electrical connection realized by the tungsten through silicon via process. Wafer- level A1Ge euteetic bonding is adopted to package the Pirani gauge in a non-hermetic cavity to protect the gauge from being damaged or contaminated in the dicing and assembling process, and to make it suitable for actual applications. To increase the accuracy of the test and restrain negative influence of temperature drift, the Wheatstone bridge structure is introduced. The test results show that before capping, the gauge has an average sensitivity of 1.04 × 104 K.W-1Torr-1 in dynamic range of 0.01 20 Torr. After capping, the sensitivity of the gauge does not decrease but increases to 1.12 × 104 K.W-1 Torr-1.

Efficient silicon integrated four-mode edge coupler for few-mode fiber coupling

Here,we designed a broadband,low loss,compact,and fabrication-tolerant silicon-based four-mode edge coupler,composed of a 1×3 adiabatic mode-evolution counter-taper splitter and a triple-tip inverse taper.Based on mode conversion and power splitting,the proposed structure can simultaneously realize efficient mode coupling from TE_(0),TM_(0),TE_(1),and TM_(1) modes of multimode silicon waveguides to linearly polarized(LP),LP^(01,x),LP_(01,y),LP_(11a,x),and LP_(11a,y),modes in the few-mode fiber.To the best of our knowledge,we proposed the first scheme of four LP modes coupling,which is fully compatible with standard fabrication process.The 3D finite-difference time-domain simulation results show that the on-chip conversion losses of the four modes remain lower than 0.62 dB over the 200 nm wavelength range,and total coupling losses are 4.1 dB,5.1 dB,2.1 dB,and 2.9 dB for TE_(0)-to-LP_(01,x),TM_(0)-to-LP_(01,y),TE_(1)-to-LP_(11a,x),and TM_(1)-to-LP_(11a,y),respectively.Good fabrication tolerance and relaxed critical dimensions make the four-mode edge coupler compatible with standard fabrication process of commercial silicon photonic foundries.