A Wafer-Level Sn-Rich Au-Sn Bonding Technique and Its Application in Surface Plasmon Resonance Sensors

Sn-rich Au Sn solder bonding is systematically investigated. High shear strength （64 MPa） and good hermeticity （a leak rate lower than 1 × 10-7 torr.1/s） are obtained for Au-Sn solder with 54wt% Sn bonded at 310℃. The AuSn2 phase with the highest Vickers-hardness among the four stable intermetMlic compounds of the Au Sn system makes a major contribution to the high bonding strength. This bonding technique has been successfully used to package the Surface Plasmon Resonance （SPR） sensors. The Sn-rieh Au-Sn solder bonding provides a reliable, low-cost, low-temperature and wafer-level hermetic packaging solution for the micro-electromechanical system devices and has potential applications in high-end biomedical sensors.     

Improvement of fabrication and characterization methods for micromechanical disk resonators

In this paper we present a novel method to fabricate reliable micro-electro-mechanical system(MEMS) disk resonators with high yield and good performance.The key breakthrough in the fabrication process is a novel approach to effectively restraining electro-chemical corrosion of polycrystalline silicon(polysilicon) electrically coupled with noble metals of MEMS devices by hydrofluoric acid(HF)-based solutions.In addition,a measurement architecture based on a differential readout topology is demonstrated.The differential circuit proposed here can effectively suppress noise and feed-through current by common-mode rejection of the differential amplifier.This differential amplifier circuit configuration is also used to build up a notch filter.The preliminary result about the temperature dependence of the resonance frequency is discussed,and the device failure is analysed.     

Design and characterization of a 3D encapsulation with silicon vias for radio frequency micro-electromechanical system resonator

In this paper, we present a three-dimensional(3D) vacuum packaging technique at a wafer level for a radio frequency micro-electromechanical system(RF MEMS) resonator, in which low-loss silicon vias is used to transmit RF signals.Au–Sn solder bonding is adopted to provide a vacuum encapsulation as well as electrical conductions. A RF model of the encapsulation cap is established to evaluate the parasitic effect of the packaging, which provides an effective design solution of 3D RF MEMS encapsulation. With the proposed packaging structure, the signal-to-background ratio(SBR) of 24 dB is achieved, as well as the quality factor(Q-factor) of the resonator increases from 8000 to 10400 after packaging.The packaged resonator has a linear frequency–temperature( f –T) characteristic in a temperature range between 0℃ and 100℃. And the package shows favorable long-term stability of the Q-factor over 200 days, which indicates that the package has excellent hermeticity. Furthermore, the average shear strength is measured to be 43.58 MPa among 10 samples.     

Ultrasensitive Detection of Infrared Photon Using Microcantilever: Theoretical Analysis

We present a new method for detecting near-infrared, mid-infrared, and far-infrared photons with an ultrahigh sensitivity. The infrared photon detection was carried out by monitoring the displacement change of a vibrating microcantilever under light pressure using a laser Doppler vibrometer. Ultrathin silicon cantilevers with high sensitivity were produced using micro/nano-fabrication technology. The photon detection system was set up. The response of the microcantilever to the photon illumination is theoretically estimated, and a nanowatt resolution for the infrared photon detection is expected at room temperature with this method.