Stability of wafer level vacuum encapsulated single-crystal silicon resonators

The stability of wafer level vacuum encapsulated micromechanical resonators is characterized. The resonators are etched of silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers using deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) and encapsulated with anodic bonding. Bulk acoustic wave (BAW) resonators show drift better than 0.1 ppm/month demonstrating that the stability requirements for a reference oscillator can be met with MEMS. The drift of flexural resonators range from 4 ppm/month to over 500 ppm/month depending on resonator anchoring. The large drift exhibited by some flexural resonator types is attributed to packaging related stresses.