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Theoretical and experimental studies on the

parylene diaphragms for microdevices

Article in Microsystem Technologies · August 2005

DOI: 10.1007/s00542-003-0342-7

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Theoretical and experimental studies on the parylene diaphragms
for microdevices
W. Sim, B. Kim, B. Choi, J.-O. Park
Abstract In this paper, parylene diaphragms with planar
and corrugated shapes are fabricated and tested. Although,
recently in MEMS, parylene has been used for a diaphragm
material due to its excellent property, no theoretical and
analytical studies of the parylene diaphragm have been
performed. Therefore, the characterization of the parylene
diaphragms is studied through both experiments and
simulations. Thermal and load-deflection analyses for
diaphragms are carried out to find the effect of residual
stress on the behavoir of the diaphragm. The measured
deflections are compared with both analytical calculations
and FEM simulations that considers the influence of the
thermal stress. Those results show excellent agreement. In
order to find an optimum shape of the corrugated dia-
phragm, the influence of the corrugation number and the
corrugation depth on the mechanical sensitivity of the
corrugated diaphragm is studied parametrically.
Keywords Parylene, Diaphragm, Thermal stress, FEM,
Optimum shape
Introduction
Silicon, metal and silicone rubber, etc. are generally used
as the membrane material for microsystem applications
[1–3]. The diaphragm of silicon or metal is relatively stiff
and does not make a large displacement. However, par-
ylene is waterproof and much more flexible than silicon
and it is possible to deposit other layers on it [4].
Received: 27 June 2003 / Accepted: 31 August 2003
W. Sim, J.-O. Park
Intelligent Microsystem Center,
P.O. Box 131, Cheongyang, Seoul, 130–365, South Korea
B. Kim
Microsystem Research center,
Korea Institute of Science and Technology, P.O. Box 131,
Cheongyang, Seoul, 130–365, South Korea
B. Choi (&)
Department of Mechanical Engineering,
Sogang University, #1 Shinsu-dong, Mapo-gu,
Seoul 121–742, South Korea
e-mail: bkchoi@ccs.sogang.ac.kr
The authors would like to thanks to Dr. Sang Sik Yang and
coworkers in the Microsystems Lab., School of Electronics
Engineering, Ajou University for the help with device processing.
This research was sponsored by Institute for Applied Science and shown in Fig. 2. The process starts with an n- type(100)
Technology of Sogang University.
Microsystem Technologies 11 (2005) 11–15
Springer-Verlag 2005
DOI 10.1007/s00542-003-0342-7
11
Moreover, since parylene is bio-compatible, many
researchers have used it for a diaphragm material [5]. In
spite of frequent uses for applications in micromachined
devices, the analytical and experimental study of parylene
diaphragm has never been performed. It is important to
figure out the accurate behavior of the parylene diaphragm
in order to design the microfluidic components such as
micopumps and microvalves.
For most applications, membrane is required to achieve
a large displacement to transfer some pressure into
working fluid. However, large initial stress can lead to
undesirable effects that make the diaphragm hard to
deflect. The many reason for residual stress are studied
and reported. The major one is the difference in thermal
expansion coefficients between two layers [6, 7]. One way
to reduce the influence of the internal stress is to use
corrugations in a diaphragm [1, 8]. For corrugated dia-
phragm structures, the effects of the residual stress cannot
be analyzed easily because of the complex structure and
non-uniform stress distribution profile. Therefore, FEM
analysis is needed in modeling and simulating corrugated
diaphragm. In this paper, the planar and corrugated par-
ylene diaphragms are fabricated and tested. Using load-
deflection method, the residual stresses of diaphragms are
obtained and experimental results are compared with
analytica l and FEM results. The commercial finite-element
code, CoventorWareTM , is employed to obtain the thermal
stress and the deflection of diaphragms corresponding to
the variation of applied pressures.
Design and fabrication
In this paper, two kinds of diaphragms are fabricated by
using anisotropic etching technique. The one is the flat
diaphragm and the other is the corrugated one. Corruga-
tions of the parylene diaphragm are suggested to increase
the deflection of the diaphragm by reducing the initial
stress. The size of the square flat diaphragm is
2.8
2.8 mm2 or 4.3
4.3 mm2 . Also, the corrugated dia-
phragm of 4.3
4.3 mm2 with 5 corrugations is fabricated
and tested to compare with flat one. The thickness (t) of
the corrugated diaphragm is 3 lm which is the same as
that of flat one. The schematic cross-sectional view of the
corrugated diaphragm is shown in Fig. 1 and its charac-
teristic parameters are listed in Table 1. The width (w) and
depth (H) of the corrugation are 80 and 20 lm, respec-
tively.
The fabrication steps of the corrugated diaphragm are
silicon wafer. The circular corrugations are first etched by
 Fig. 1. The schematic cross-sectional view of the corrugated
parylene diaphragm

Table 1. The characterisrtic parameters of the corrugatd

dipaphragm
12
Parameter Symbol Value

Radius
Diaphragm thickness
Corrugation depth
Corrugation arc length
Corrugation pitch
Corrugation width
a 2.15 mm
t 3 lm
H 20 lm Fig. 3. The enlarged view of the corrugated diphragm. a The
S 209 lm buckled portion before removal of oxide. b The diaphragm after
P 160 lm etching the residual stress
w 80 lm

Fig. 2. The fabrication process. a Oxidation (6000 Å). b Corru-

gation etch (20 lm). c Parylene deposition (3 lm). d Backside
etch in EDP. e Oxide removal
Fig. 4. SEM photographs for the corrugated parylene diaphragm.
a The corrugation of the diaphragm. b The parylene layer 3 m
20 lm into the frontal surface of the silicon using ethylene thick
diamine pyrocatechol (EDP) solution. For flat diaphragm,
this corrugation etching is omitted. After removing the
silicon dioxide, another silicon dioxide layer of 0.6 lm
thickness is thermally grown again. Parylene-C of 3 lm
thickness is deposited by using parylene deposition system
(Labcoater, PDS 2010, SCS Inc.). During this process,
temperature and pressure in the deposition chamber are
25  C and 0.1 torr, respectively. Under these conditions,
the parylene polymer can be formed as continuous films
due to the vapor phase deposition. Afterward, the backside
of the wafer is patterned and silicon is etched away in EDP
solution using the silicon dioxide as an etch-stop layer.
Finally, the residual oxide under the parylene layer is re-
moved using buffered oxide etching (BOE) solution. The
enlarged view of the fabricated parylene diaphragm is
shown in Fig. 3. Figure 3a illustrates the buckled portion
of diaphragm due to a compressive stress of silicon
dioxide under the parylene layer. The stretched parylene
diaphragm with tensile stress after removing the residual
oxide is shown in Fig. 3b. The SEM photographs of the
cross sectional view are shown in Fig. 4a and 4b, respec-
tively.
The stress induced by the process of parylene deposi-
tion can be neglected because the temperature in reaction
chamber does not rise more than a few degrees above the
ambient. Therefore, it is considered that temperature
change, DT = 75  C, during silicon wet etching process is
the major reason for the residual stress of the parylene
layer.
Theoretical analyses
The difference in thermal expansion coefficients between
silicon substrate and parylene layer causes the thermal
stress when temperature changes occur. The thermal
expansion coefficients of silicon and parylene are
2.6
106 / C and 3.5
105 / C, respectively. During the
silicon etching process in EDP etchant, the temperature is
increased up to about 100  C. Therefore, the temperature
change, DT = 75  C, causes the residual stress which is a
very important factor for diaphragm performance. The Fig. 6. A deflected square diaphragm due to applied pressure
physical and mechanical properties of parylene-C are 13
presented in Table 2. Poisson’ s ratio of parylene is
assumed to be 0.4. The theoretical thermal strains due to
temperature change are as follows:
rx  tpa rz
epa ¼ ðasi  apa ÞDT; esi ¼ asi DT and epa ¼
Epa
ð1Þ
where e is the thermal strain, a the thermal expansion
coefficient, r the thermal stress, E Young’s modulus, and m
the Poisson’ s ratio. The parylene layer on the silicon
Fig. 7. Experimental setup for pressure-deflection mesurement
substrate is modeled as a biaxial state as shown in Fig. 5.
With an assumption of rx ¼ rz and strain compatibility
(ex ¼ ez ), we have tr tE 3
pðhÞ ¼ C1
h þ C2 ðvÞ 4 h ð4Þ
rx  vPa rz a2 a
asi DT  apa DT ¼ ð2Þ
Epa where C1 and C2 (m) are numerical constants, p is the
applied pressure, h the center deflection, a one half of the
Thus,
edge length, t the thickness. The value of the C1 is 3.45 and
Epa C2 can be written in the form C2 (m) = 1.994(1-0.271m)/
rx ¼ rz ¼ ðasi  apa ÞDT ð3Þ (1m) [9]. Equation (4) is derived with the assumption of
1  mpa
large deflection of thin films(h>>t). The measured
The load-deflection method is well known technique to deflections of flat diaphragm with respect to applied
determine the residual stress of the membrane structure. A pressures are compared with analytical and FEM results.
square flat diaphragm under applied pressure is shown in Also, on the basis of known data such as measured
Fig. 6. Theoretically, the relationship between the pres- deflections and applied pressures, the residual stress (r) is
sure, p, and the center deflection of the flat square dia- compared with the thermal stress calculated by both
phragm, h, is as follows: Eq. (3) and simulation.

Table 2. The properties of parylene-C Experiment and simulation

The experimental setup for load-deflection relation of
Property Value diaphragm is shown in Fig. 7. The parylene diaphragm
mounted on the pressure chamber is tested under various
Density 1.289 g/cm3 pressures and then the corresponding deflections are
Young’ s modulus 4.5 Gpa measured by using a laser displacement meter(KEYENCE-
Poisson’ s ratio 0.4 LC 2420). The applied pressure is monitored by a digital
Thermal expansion coefficient 3.5 · 10)5/C
display(INSTECH SM-50) which is connected to a pressure
Tensile strength 69 MPa
Melting point 290 C sensor. Also, the pressure level is controlled by a syringe
pump(KDS 100 kd Scientific co.).
The commercial finite-element code, CoventorWareTM ,
is used for the simulations. The 3D models are created for
both flat and corrugated diaphragms. In order to reduce
the computation time, a quarter symmetric modeling
technique is employed. For solving the governing differ-
ential equation, FE model for the flat diaphragm is meshed
with brick elements and the tetrahedral elements(free
meshing) are taken for the corrugated diaphragm because
of its complex geometry. In the procedure of FEM analysis,
first, thermal analysis is performed on the constructed 3D
model with known material properties and symmetric
Fig. 5. A biaxial model for parylene on the silicon substrate boundary conditions. Afterward, the given pressures are

14
Fig. 8. Comparison of measured results among flat (2.8 mm2 ),
flat (4.3 mm2 ) and corrugated (4.3 mm2 ) diaphragms
Fig. 9. The residual stress of the flat diaphragm according to
differences in Temperature
applied to the pre-stressed diaphragm. Thus, the super-
position technique is used to analyze the effect of internal
stress on the behavior of the parylene diaphragm.
Results and discussion
Figure 8 shows the displacements of the flat and corru-
gated diaphragms under the various pressures. The
deflections of the flat and corrugated diaphragms with the
size of 4.3
4.3 mm2 are 40 and 200 lm under 1.5 kPa,
respectively. Compared with other materials, parylene
diaphragm has achieved relatively large displacement at
the same level of pressure due to its low Young’ s modulus.
The thermal stress on the parylene layer caused by the
difference in thermal expansion coefficients is obtained by
analytical and finite-element calculations and the results
are compared in Fig. 9. After temperature
change(DT = 75  C) occurs in the silicon wet etching
process, the residual stress of the flat diaphragm is ana-
lytically 18.2 MPa. Figure 10 shows the stress distribution
over one quarter of the flat and corrugated diaphragms at
DT = 75  C. The internal stress on the flat diaphragm is
uniformly distributed. For the corrugated diaphragm,
however, the value of stress on the center of the diaphragm
is almost zero and it is increased as it goes to the edge.
According to the thermal FE analysis, it is known that
corrugation structure prevents the stress from taking place
and this effect is made, in particular, at the flat zone lo-
cated in the middle of the diaphragm. Therefore, great
increase in displacement is achieved.
Fig. 10. Simulated stress distribution, at DT=75  C. Quarter
symmetry model. All units are in MPa. a Contour plot for the flat.
b Contour plot for the corrugated
Fig. 11. Comparison among theoretical, measured and simulated
deflections of flat diaphragm (4.3 mm2 ) with residual stress,
18.2 MPa, corresponding to the various pressures
With a consideration of 18.2 MPa initial stress, the
comparisons among the experimental, analytical and
simulated load-deflection results of flat diaphragms with
the sizes of 4.3
4.3 mm2 are shown in Fig. 11. Also, the
effect of residual stress is examined by comparing exper-
imental results with the theoretical results without con-
sidering the effect of residual stress. The results show that
the measured deflection is about a half of the deflection of
the stress-free diaphragm at 3 kPa. The theoretical and
simulation results that consider the internal stress show
excellent agreement with the experimental values. There-
fore, our prediction that the thermal stress is mainly
caused by the thermal process is proved to be correct.
Some deviations between FEM analyses and experiments
are considered to be measurement errors.
Based on the experimental and FEM results of the flat
diaphragm, we could know FEM analysis is a reliable
approach for this problem. Therefore, deflection of a
corrugated diaphragm under various pressures is simu-
lated and compared to experimental results as shown in
Fig. 12. Our simulation results are well matched with
measurements. In this case, the deflection of the corru-
gated diaphragm is much larger than that of the flat one
under the same pressures because the corrugations reduce
the residual stress significantly. However, as we know in
Fig. 12, the effects of internal stress regarding to deflection
still cannot be ignored. Thus, to improve the load-deflec-
tion performance of the corrugated diaphragm, the para-
metric study on the influence of the corrugation number
and corrugation depth on the mechanical sensitivity is
performed. The mechanical sensitivity is defined as the
 have been presented. According to the results, it has been
proved that the residual stress on parylene layer is mainly
induced by not parylene deposition but silicon wet etching
process since the thermal expansion coefficient of the
parylene is more than 10 times that of silicon. This internal
stress significantly affects the load-deflection relationship
of both flat and corrugated diaphragms. Compared with
flat diaphragm, the corrugated structure reduces the
residual stress dramatically and increases the deflection
more than 5 times. Namely, a pre-stressed flat diaphragm
has more rigidity than a corrugated one. Therefore, in
15
order to reduce the influence of the residual stress, the
Fig. 12. Comparison of the simulated and measured deflection of parametric FE study has been investigated and the
the flat and corrugated diaphragm (4.3 mm2 ) according to various improved mechanical sensitivity has been obtained.
applied pressures
The measurements are consistent with simulation
results, which show that FE methods could be applicable to
predict the behavior of both planar and corrugated
parylene diaphragm. Thus, this work helps to understand
the accurate behavior of the parylene diaphragm in terms
of load-deflection relationship and it could be used as a
guideline in designing the optimum shape of the
diaphragm for applications to micromachined devices.

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Conclusions
The first experimental and analytical study on the parylene
diaphragms has been performed and their characteristics

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