Residual Stress Effect on Performance of Diaphragm-Based MEMS Pressure Transducers
Abstract We experimentally and theoretically confirm that residual stress within a diaphragm is critical in limiting the performance of diaphragm-based piezoelectric microphones even if the stress is low (around 50 MPa). We have fabricated and studied microphones with Al/parylene/ZnO/SiN2/poly-Si/SiN1 (from top to bottom) diaphragm. As the SiN1 supporting layer is removed layer by layer from the backside with CF4 plasma (in an RIE system), we measure both the sensitivity and center displacement of the microphone before and after each RIE etching of the SiN1 from the microphone diaphragm, and find the sensitivity increasing about 5–16 times with the best sensitivity reaching 11 μV/μbar from a mere 0.6 μV/μbar. The center displacement increases very moderately as the SiN1 layer thickness decreases from 0.8 to 0.2 μm. However, the center displacement starts to increase greatly as the SiN1 layer thickness goes below 0.2 μm, which compares with our theoretical analysis well. In the case of the SiN1 layer having compressive residual stress, the compressive stress can enhance the microphone sensitivity and center displacement to a certain extent.