A study of U-shaped micromachined cantilever array

In order to increase the resolution and realize the versatility of cantilever, U-shaped piezoresistive cantilever array has been designed and fabricated in this research. The optimized geometries of cantilever and piezoresistor were determined by analyzing the stress, noise and sensitivity of piezoresistive cantilever from theory. Based on silicon micromachining technology, the piezoresistive cantilevers were fabricated by using polysilicon as the piezoresistive materials. With the measurement results of noise and sensitivity, the Hooge factor was calculated to be 3×10 -3 , the gauge factor is 27, and the minimum detectable deflection of piezoresistive cantilever was calculated to be 0.5nm at a 6V bias voltage and a 1000Hz measurement bandwidth. The noise sources of polysilicon pizeoresistor are also discussed in this paper.