Polycrystalline diamond MEMS resonator technology for sensor applications

Due to material limitations of poly-Si resonators, polycrystalline diamond (poly-C) has been explored as a new MEMS resonator material. The poly-C resonators are designed, fabricated and tested using electrostatic (Michigan State University) and piezoelectric (Sandia National Laboratories) actuation methods, and the results are compared. For comparable resonator structures, although the resonance frequencies are similar, the measured Q values in the ranges of 1000–2000 and 10,000–15,000 are obtained for electrostatic and piezoelectric actuation methods, respectively. The difference in Q for the two methods is related to different pressures used during the measurement and not to the method of measurement. For the poly-C cantilever beam resonators, the highest value of their quality factor (Q) is reported for the first time (15,263).