Resonant sensors

One of the key issues in development of resonant devices at micro and nanoscales is the understanding and control of damping. If a silicon based MEMS resonator can be operated under vacuum packed conditions, Qs of the order of several thousand, say 100,000 is not hard to achieve.

 With continuous improvement in resonator design and fabrication, it seems likely that MEMS resonators may replace the dominance of quartz oscillators in electronic circuits for clock applications. Also, there are several applications of MEMS oscillators in RF devices.

 Resonant MEMS devices are largely made up of simple mechanical structures that vibrate in response to some actuation, typically a periodic electrostatic force. The main elements used in the design of these devices are a mechanical resonator structure that provides inertia and elastic restoring force for basic oscillations, air or gas around the structure that provides external damping, and an actuation mechanism that sets the structure in motion. On this basic structure one can build fairly sophisticated system with controls for frequency stability or frequency tuning, etc.

Resonator Building Blocks: Beams, Plates and Membranes

The most common mechanical structures used in resonators are beams, plates and membranes. A large variety of resonator structures can be obtained by an appropriate combination of these simple mechanical structures.

Modeling
All mechanical resonators, simple or complex, share the basic DNA of elasticity and inertia. The mother of all resonators is the single degree of freedom spring mass model that captures the essence of oscillatory systems and resonance. It is, therefore, natural that we try to model all mechanical resonators with spring-mass models.

 Irrespective of how complex the structure is, if its oscillatory motion of interest can be produced by thinking of an equivalent spring (representing the relevant stiffness of the structure) and a mass (representing, again, the relevant inertia), the problem of modelling the resonator reduces to well studied and well known responses of a spring-mass system.

The cantilever beam resonator happens to be one of the most popular MEMS and NEMS resonators.

Scaling Resonant Frequency