Fabrication of Diamond Microstructures by Using Dry and Wet Etching Methods

Diamond films have great potential for micro-electro-mechanical system（MEMS） application.For device realization,precise patterning of diamond films at micrometer scale is indispensable.In this paper,simple and facile methods will be demonstrated for smart patterning of diamond films,in which two etching techniques,i.e.,plasma dry etching and chemical wet etching（including isotropic-etching and anisotropic-etching） have been developed for obtaining diamond microstructures with different morphology demands.Free-standing diamond micro-gears and micro-combs were achieved as examples by using the experimental procedures.It is confirmed that as-designed diamond structures with a straight side wall and a distinct boundary can be fabricated effectively and efficiently by using such methods.

Fabrication of Silicon Crystal-Facet-Dependent Nanostructures by Electron-Beam Lithography

Silicon crystal-facet-dependent nanostructures have been successfully fabricated on a （100）-oriented silicon-oninsulator wafer using electron-beam lithography and the silicon anisotropic wet etching technique. This technique takes advantage of the large difference in etching properties for different crystallographic planes in alkaline solution. The minimum size of the trapezoidal top for those Si nanostructures can be reduced to less than 10nm. Scanning electron microscopy （SEM） and atomic force microscopy （AFM） observations indicate that the etched nanostructures have controllable shapes and smooth surfaces.

Resonant pitch and roll silicon gyroscopes with sub-micron-gap slanted electrodes:Breaking the barrier toward high-performance monolithic inertial measurement units

This paper presents the design,fabrication,and characterization of a novel high quality factor(Q)resonant pitch/roll gyroscope implemented in a 40μm(100)silicon-on-insulator(SOI)substrate without using the deep reactive-ion etching(DRIE)process.The featured silicon gyroscope has a mode-matched operating frequency of 200 kHz and is the first out-of-plane pitch/roll gyroscope with electrostatic quadrature tuning capability to fully compensate for fabrication non-idealities and variation in SOI thickness.The quadrature tuning is enabled by slanted electrodes with sub-micron capacitive gaps along the(111)plane created by an anisotropic wet etching.The quadrature cancellation enables a 20-fold improvement in the scale factor for a typical fabricated device.Noise measurement of quadrature-cancelled mode-matched devices shows an angle random walk(ARW)of 0.63°√h^(−1) and a bias instability of 37.7°h^(−1),partially limited by the noise of the interface electronics.The elimination of silicon DRIE in the anisotropically wet-etched gyroscope improves the gyroscope robustness against the process variation and reduces the fabrication costs.The use of a slanted electrode for quadrature tuning demonstrates an effective path to reach high-performance in future pitch and roll gyroscope designs for the implementation of single-chip high-precision inertial measurement units(IMUs).