VHF NEMS-CMOS piezoresistive resonators for advanced sensing applications.

This work reports on top-down nanoelectromechanical resonators, which are among the smallest resonators listed in the literature. To overcome the fact that their electromechanical transduction is intrinsically very challenging due to their very high frequency (100 MHz) and ultimate size (each resonator is a 1.2 μm long, 100 nm wide, 20 nm thick silicon beam with 100 nm long and 30 nm wide piezoresistive lateral nanowire gauges), they have been monolithically integrated with an advanced fully depleted SOI CMOS technology.

High frequency top-down junction-less silicon nanowire resonators.

We report here the first realization of top-down silicon nanowires (SiNW) transduced by both junction-less field-effect transistor (FET) and the piezoresistive (PZR) effect. The suspended SiNWs are among the smallest top-down SiNWs reported to date, featuring widths down to ~20 nm. This has been achieved thanks to a 200 mm-wafer-scale, VLSI process fully amenable to monolithic CMOS co-integration.