Piezoelectric MEMS/NEMS—Materials, Devices, and Applications, Third Edition

A special issue of Micromachines (ISSN 2072-666X). This special issue belongs to the section "E:Engineering and Technology".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 January 2025 | Viewed by 3435

Special Issue Editor

Department of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT 05405, USA
Interests: MEMS; microrobotics; smart materials; energy harvesting
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Piezoelectric materials have been playing a crucial role in a large number of devices and applications that have promoted a variety of today’s technological progress and impacted modern society. They are widely used as sensors and actuators, and they can be deposited as thin films over standard silicon substrates or flexible substrates. Typically, piezoelectric sensors feature high sensitivity, a wide dynamic range, and are self-powering; piezoelectric actuators enable high resolution, large force, and/or large displacement generation. The strong electromechanical coupling, simple geometric implementation, and high energy density endow the piezoelectric device with the capability of energy harvesting. The appeal of piezoelectric materials for MEMS/NEMS has been constantly growing, in particular, with the increasing commercial success of piezoelectric MEMS/NEMS devices. The upcoming era of Big Data, sensors, the Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been offering new opportunities and challenges to piezoelectric MEMS/NEMS devices, and we are seeing researchers throughout the world actively tapping into the state-of-the-art micro/nano-fabrication process, promoting advanced integration techniques, and exploring innovative applications to unleash the potential of piezoelectric MEMS/NEMS devices. In this Special Issue, we invite submissions exploring the latest advances in the field of piezoelectric MEMS/NEMS devices.

Dr. Wei Li
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • piezoelectric sensors and actuators
  • microrobotics
  • piezoelectric MEMS resonators
  • acoustic MEMS devices
  • surface acoustic wave devices
  • energy-harvesting technologies
  • simulation and modeling of piezoelectric MEMS
  • application of smart materials in MEMS
  • micro/nanofabrication

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

14 pages, 5979 KiB  
Article
Design, Fabrication, Characterization, and Simulation of AlN-Based Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducer for Sonar Imaging Applications
by Wenxing Chen, Shenglin Ma, Xiaoyi Lai, Zhizhen Wang, Hui Zhao, Qiang Zha, Yihsiang Chiu and Yufeng Jin
Micromachines 2024, 15(6), 781; https://doi.org/10.3390/mi15060781 - 13 Jun 2024
Viewed by 3290
Abstract
To address the requirements of sonar imaging, such as high receiving sensitivity, a wide bandwidth, and a wide receiving angle, an AlN PMUT with an optimized ratio of 0.6 for the piezoelectric layer diameter to backside cavity diameter is proposed in this paper. [...] Read more.
To address the requirements of sonar imaging, such as high receiving sensitivity, a wide bandwidth, and a wide receiving angle, an AlN PMUT with an optimized ratio of 0.6 for the piezoelectric layer diameter to backside cavity diameter is proposed in this paper. A sample AlN PMUT is designed and fabricated with the SOI substrate-based bulk MEMS process. The characterization test result of the sample demonstrates a −6 dB bandwidth of approximately 500 kHz and a measured receiving sensitivity per unit area of 1.37 V/μPa/mm2, which significantly surpasses the performance of previously reported PMUTs. The −6 dB horizontal angles of the AlN PMUT at 300 kHz and 500 kHz are measured as 68.30° and 54.24°, respectively. To achieve an accurate prediction of its characteristics when being packaged and assembled in a receive array, numerical simulations with the consideration of film stress are conducted. The numerical result shows a maximum deviation of ±7% in the underwater receiving sensitivity across the frequency range of 200 kHz to 1000 kHz and a deviation of about 0.33% in the peak of underwater receiving sensitivity compared to the experimental data. By such good agreement, the simulation method reveals its capability of providing theoretical foundation for enhancing the uniformity of AlN PMUTs in future studies. Full article
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