THE APPLICATION OF MEMS TECHNOLOGY TO MICROLITHOGRAPHY AND MOBILE COMMUNICATION

KUKJIN CHUN
School of Electrical Engineering and Inter-university Semiconductor Research Center (ISRC) Seoul National University, San 56-1, Shinlim-Dong, Kwanak-Ku, Seoul 151-742, Korea Phone: 82-2-880-1811, FAX: 82-2-871-6989, e-mail: kchun@mintlab.snu.ac.kr

ABSTRACT
This paper presents the brief introduction of MEMS technology as well as its application area. Additionally, the research activities are shown especially on RF MEMS, Bio MEMS, IMU(Inertial Measurement Unit) and Microlithography(Microcolumn). The facilities for MEMS research in Seoul National University are also described. Keywords: MEMS, RF MEMS, Bio MEMS, IMU, Microcolumn The MEMS technology is an enabling technology in many related areas such as wireless communication system, health monitoring system, personal navigation system, environmental monitoring as shown in Fig. 1. The MEMS technology is based on the semiconductor fabrication process except that it can realize 3 dimensional devices. Basic techniques of MEMS are surface micromachining and bulk micromachining. Surface micromachining technique uses the polysilicon structure above the substrate, which is similar to the conventional semiconductor process. Bulk micromachining uses the characteristics of silicon wet etching. Other technique such as wafer bonding, deep silicon etching are being developed. Conventionally, the MEMS is used to fabricate the physical sensors such as pressure sensor, accelerometer, gyroscope using surface and bulk micromachining techniques. Recently, the application area is expanded to the RF communication, bio technology, microlithography. In this paper, the research activities in the areas that mentioned above are introduced briefly. For RF communication, the MEMS inductor and capacitor are integrated on the same chip of RF commnication module for voltage controlled oscillator(VCO), which shows the improvement in phase nois e compared with the conventional CMOS VCO. For bio area application, the novel fluidics chips are developed using bonding technique between quartz and PDMS. In microlithography, the miniaturized lithography system called as microcolumn is developed using 7-layer silicon-glass bonding technique. Finally, the developed accelerometer and gyroscope are shown.

Fig. 1 The application area of MEMS technology

RF MEMS The increasing demand for wireless communication equipment has driven researchers to produce transceivers at lower cost. This has led to an intense interest in integrating as many components as possible. One high-speed component that has been particularly hard to integrated is the voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs). This is largely due to the poor quality of the on-chip passive components in silicon integrated circuit technologies, namely the low quality factor Q of on-chip inductors and the poor linearity of on-chip varactors. We have fabricated high-performance suspension type spiral inductor on a various substrate materials using MEMS process. The measured inductor fabricated on Quartz has inductance between 1 nH and 5 nH, maximum Q factor over 40 at 6 GHz. To fully use the advantages of RF MEMS, we integrated inductor on a RFIC chip to make a VCO. The designed VCO circuit was fabricated with Hynix 0.18 um CMOS process. The phase noise of VCO which MEMS inductor was integrated shows high performance of 93.5 dBc/Hz at offset frequency of 100 kHz[1].

Fig. 2. SEM photography of MEMS inductor integrated with VCO

Fig. 3. Phase noise of VCO with MEMS suspension type inductor and CMOS spiral type inductor

Tunable capacitor is essential device for the operation of VCO in wireless communication circuit. It was known that MEMS tunable capacitor is superior to CMOS varactor in quality factor, linearity and tunability. We design flat type MEMS tunable capacitor with high Q at 5 GHz by reduction of parasitic effect and fringing effect. Fig. 4 shows SEM photograph of MEMS tunable capacitor. The measured capacitor shows the nominal capacitance of 730 pF, 48% tuning range at 5 GHz.
1.3 40

1.2

1.1 30

Capacitance (pF)

Q facotr

1.0 20

Capacitance (at nomial gap) : 730 pF Tuning ratio (0 ~ 7V range ) : 48 %

0.9

0.8 10 0.7

0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

0.6

Control Voltage (V)

Fig. 4. SEM photograph of MEMS tunable capacitor Fig. 5. Quality factor and capacitance of MEMS tunable capacitor DIAGNOSIS SYSTEM Recently, as the biotechnology has developed, the real time diagnosis would be possible. Because bioMEMS chip could provide a fast result for various parameters from a single array structure and multi results from array structure. We have developed the isotachophoresis capillary electrophoresis system for the protein diagnosis in a blood. It could concentrate the organic molecule like protein and amino acid by over 500 folded-times just in the 2 cm x 1.5 cm chip. In this result, the diagnosis of small concentration molecule in a blood could be easily diagnosed. n TITP (TRANSIENT ISOTACHOPHORESIS) CHIP A single column isotachophoresis -capillary zone electrophoresis (ITP-CZE) system on a PDMS

(polydimethylsiloxane) chip is described. The PDMS substrate is generally known to be non-electroosmotic. However, the velocity and resolution can be improved as an additional coating of electroosmotic flow modifier is added. The injection type is a type of T-injector, and the channel, which is used for sample injection, is longer than the traditional T-injector to allow for a large volume sample with a low concentration. Sample concentration and separation occurs in a single column. The fabricated PDMS chip is shown in Fig. 6 (a). Through a dyestuff experiment, the concentration step and separation procedures were observed using a microscope. The measured result is shown in Fig. 6 (b). All these procedures were operated by only an E-field. Chloride ions were used as the leading electrolyte, and the injected volume was approximately 18 n . Under LIF conditions in these experiments, the limit of detection (LOD) was approximately 30 pM[2].

(a) (b) Fig. 6. (a) Fabricated TITP chip (b) Laser induced fluorescene test result per each injection length
POSITION DETECTION The personal position information could be a dominant factor in a future mobile communication society in which the electromagnetic wave would be transmitted to the direction of each person by smart antenna. Inertial measurement units like accelerometer and gyroscope can be the adequate solution to this application. Therefore, the resonant accelerometer can be a good candidate for a future mobile communication system because it has semi-digital output and high sensitivity. n ACCELEROMETER A resonant accelerometer, which utilizes an electrostatic stiffness changing effect, has special features of high sensitivity, electrical tunability, and very simple fabrication process. But this kind of parallel plate resonant structure has some drawbacks of non-linearity, and difficulty in controlling the resonant vibration mode within the stable region, because the vibrating mode is parallel to the input acceleration axis. In this study, we de-coupled the G-sensitive structure and gap sensitive resonator using separate torsion beams . The two identical torsional resonators (Mr) are connected to the outer gimbals, which have asymmetric mass distribution (M1, M2). The measured Q-factor of the vacuum packaged DRXL was about 1 103 and the estimated inner pressure was about 200[mTorr]. We also achieved 73[ ] output frequency change per unit G(9.8 ) input with 12,716[ ] nominal resonant frequency[3].

resonator 2 PAD ? ? Ti

resonator 1 proof mass

Fig. 7. Photograph of the DRXL chip MICROLITHOGRAPHY(MICROCOLUMN)

Fig. 8. Test results of dynamic region

Multiple exposure is possible through miniaturization of conventional ebeam lithography in an array form, microcolumn , which can improve the throughput of the electron-beam lithography productivity. A

microcolumn is composed of a field emission tip, a deflector, an einzel lens. The field emission tip, which is a source of the electron-beam, was fabricated with spindt type tip using the self-aligned gate electrode in order to emit electron effectively. In addition, molybdenum was used for tip material to keep thermal stability at high temperature. The deflector used highly doped silicon for deflector pole and partial interconnection, while the main interconnection used Cu metal. Also, this study describes a multiple arrayed deflector with a reduced amount of wiring by utilizing the inside wiring connection technique using MEMS technology, such as multi wafer anodic bonding techniques and copper electroplating. The einzel lens as electrostatic lens was fabricated using Bosch deep silicon etching technique and silicon membrane etching process[4].

(b) Fig. 9. (a) SEM photographs of the microcolumn, (b) Ph otograph of the fabricated arrayed deflector
CONCLUSION In this paper, the MEMS technology are briefly introduced and the research results in our group are also shown in the area of RF MEMS, Bio MEMS, IMU and Microlithography. The MEMS technology will be key technology in many applications including communication, health monitoring, position sensing in next decade. Especially, the RF MEMS is one of areas that MEMS makes a great contribution. Therefore, CATS(Center for Advanced Transceiver System) is established in Seoul National University to implement a transceiver system for high end wireless application: currently 16 institutions are working together to realize a 802.11a wireless WLAN module.

(a)

Fig. 10. The chip for wireless communication of next generation REFERENCE 1. M. J. Kim et al.,High-performance on-chip integrable inductor for RF application, in The 3rd Japan-Korea joint workshop on advanced semiconductor processes and equipments, Oct. 2002, pp.149-151 2. Y. W. Jeong et al., Chip based Single-column TITP(Transient isotachophoresis) separator, The 16th European Conference on Solid -State Transducers,Prague, Czech Republic, September 2002, pp. 687-688 3. B. L. Lee et al., A vacuum packaged differential resonant accelerometer using electrostatic stiffness changing effect, in 13th IEEE MEMS, Jan 2000, pp.353-357 4. H. Kim et al., The novel deflector for multi arrayed microcolumn using MEMS technology, in MNC 2002, Nov. 2002, pp.330-331