A new geometry of high-force electrothermal actuator is demonstrated using microelectromechanical systems technology. The actuator consists of two sets of inclined, parallel, suspended beams, which are tethered at one end and linked together at the other. The first set is divided into two halves, which are connected in series and heated electrically. The second set acts as a tether for the firs...

Micro power sources are required to be used in autonomous microelectromechanical system (MEMS). In this paper, we designed and fabricated a three dimensional (3D) MEMS supercapacitor, which is consisting of conformal silicon dioxide/titanium/polypyrrole (PPy) layers on silicon substrate. At first, through-structure was fabricated on the silicon substrate by high-aspect-ratio deep reactive ion e...

0167-9317/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier B.V. A doi:10.1016/j.mee.2009.05.011 * Corresponding author. Fax: +43 1 58801 36099. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (O. Ertl), se Selberherr). This paper presents three-dimensional simulations of deep reactive ion etching processes, also known as Bosch processes. A Monte Carlo method, accelerated by ray tracing algorithms, is used to solve the...

A silicon micromachining method that is able to create deep silicon dioxide blocks at selected locations in a silicon substrate is presented. The process combines deep-reactive-ion etching (DRIE), thermal oxidation, deposition of silicon dioxide and optional planarization. Design issues and parameters for the creation of such blocks are discussed. The selectively defined silicon dioxide blocks ...

A tuning element has been constructed using micro-opto-electro-mechanical systems (MOEMS) technology for Littman configuration external cavity tunable lasers. The device is fabricated by deep reactive ion etching of bonded silicon-on-insulator, using a single layer of patterning to integrate a fixed grating and a mirror that is rotated about a virtual pivot by an electrostatic comb drive. The m...

In this paper, a single-mask substrate transfer process for the fabrication of high-aspect-ratio (HAR) suspended structures is presented. The HAR silicon structures are fabricated using a deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) technique and then transferred to a glass wafer using silicon/thin film/glass anodic bonding and silicon thinning techniques. The HAR structures are released using self-aligned...

A highly chemical reactive ion etching process has been developed for MOVPE-grown GaN on sapphire. The key element for the enhancement of the chemical property during etching is the use of a fluorine containing gas in a chlorine based chemistry. In the perspective of using GaN substrates for homo-epitaxy of high quality GaN/AlGaN structures we have used the above described RIE process to smooth...

The performance of a solar cell is critically dependent on absorption of incident photons and their conversion into electrical current. This report describes research efforts that have been directed toward the use of nanoscale surface texturing techniques to enhance light absorption in Si. This effort has been divided into two approaches. The first is to use plasma-etching to produce random tex...

Sculpturing desired shapes in single crystal diamond is ever more crucial in the realization of complex devices for nanophotonics, quantum computing, and quantum optics. The crystallographic orientation dependent wet etch of single crystalline silicon in potassium hydroxide (KOH) allows a range of shapes to be formed and has significant impacts on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), atomic f...