Amorphous Silicon Carbide for MEMS Applications

This work describes the development of MEMS fabrication techniques for amorphous Silicon Carbide (a-SiC). Mechanical and chemical characterization studies demonstrate the extensive applicability of a-SiC to a wide variety of MEMS applications due its high Young's modulus and chemical resistivity to most common MEMS etchants. Techniques for patterning a-SiC have been also been developed in this work. Integration of a-SiC based MEMS devices with Stereolithography is explored in this work and a method of integration of stereolithographic structures into MEMS devices with high alignment accuracy is described. The test case used in this work to demonstrate the applicability of a-SiC to MEMS is a microscaled four point probe.

Autorentext

Arnab Choudhury received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta in 2007. His research interests span CMOS & MEMS fabrication and packaging technologies, microcantilever sensor systems and chemical sensor systems.