Thin-Film Piezoelectric Suspended MEMS Resonators for Reducing Anchor Loss

This work reports a novel design for piezoelectrically actuated silicon-based MEMS resonators for reducing the anchor loss towards achieving high quality factor (Q) required for precision timing applications. In this novel design, the piezoelectric thin-film concurrently excites and clamps a block of single-crystal silicon (Si), thus eliminating the anchor loss associated with clamping the Si block itself. The reported design has been applied to thickness Lame mode (TLM) resonators which are favorable for high <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$Q$</tex> applications. Simulation results show up to 5K times increase in anchor <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$Q$</tex> which is verified by fabricated devices. Despite far from ideal fabrication process, the results are promising in comparison to conventionally clamped TLM resonators.