Highly tunable NEMS shallow arches

Abstract

We report highly tunable nanoelectromechanical systems NEMS shallow arches under dc excitation voltages. Silicon based in-plane doubly clamped bridges, slightly curved as shallow arches, are fabricated using standard electron beam lithography and surface nanomachining of a highly conductive device layer on a silicon-on-insulator wafer. By designing the structures to have gap to thickness ratio of more than four, the mid-plane stretching of the nano arches is maximized such that an increase in the dc bias voltage will result into continuous increase in the resonance frequency of the resonators to wide ranges. This is confirmed analytically based on a nonlinear beam model. The experimental results are found to be in good agreement with that of the results from developed analytical model. A maximum tunability of 108.14% for a 180 nm thick arch with an initially designed gap of 1 μm between the beam and the driving/sensing electrodes is achieved. Furthermore, a tunable narrow bandpass filter is demonstrated, which opens up opportunities for designing such structures as filtering elements in high frequency ranges.