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Justin's Project Page |
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Intern: Justin Scott, UC Berkeley
Mentor: Lor Callaghan
Faculty Supervisor: Dr. Noel MacDonald
Department: Mechanical Engineering |
SCREAM MEMS
MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS) is a rapidly emerging field of integrating electronics, sensors, actuators and mechanical elements on a single miniature chip. One of the biggest tasks facing current MEMS is finding efficient and reliable methods of machining these tiny structures. Presently, the two main types of production are bulk and surface micromachining. I was involved with a specific type of bulk micromachining known as the Single Crystal Reactive Etching And Metallization (SCREAM) process. This type of processing uses a top-down approach of etching specific patterns into a substrate. I assisted in design of a course that would help provide an overview of the SCREAM process and offer an introduction to processing in the cleanroom to undergraduate engineering students. With the knowledge I gained from this project, I then moved on to assist in the Mechanical Integration of Networked Telecommunications (MINT) assignment. With the MINT project, we aim to design a MEMS piezoelectric filter with a high quality factor for RF devices such as cellular phones. Most of today’s RF filters are off-chip components. The MINT project is attempting to integrate a complete filter into one chip and simplify the process. My task was to characterize the amount of stress exhibited in a four-inch silicon substrate after the removal of one side of thermally grown oxide. In doing this I determined if thermal oxidation would affect the curvature of the substrate and force the use of Plasma-Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition (PECVD); a less desirable process due to the incorporation of impurities in the deposited film.
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