Monolithic Sensor Integration in CMOS Technologies

Besides being mainstream for mixed-signal electronics, CMOS technology can be used to integrate micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) on a single die, taking advantage of the structures and materials available in feature sizes around 180 nm. In this article, we demonstrate that back-end-of-line (BEOL) layers postprocessed opportunistically create several kinds MEMS sensors exhibiting good or even excellent performance, such as accelerometers, pressure sensors, magnetometers. Despite limitations mechanical material properties technology, due monolithic integration, these are compensated by significant reduction parasitics size. Furthermore, work opens path integrated multisensor (and actuator) chips, including data fusion intelligent processing.