Fabrication and micromechanical characterization of polycrystalline diamond microcantilevers

The exceptional chemical, mechanical and thermal properties of diamond make this material the ideal choice for resonant MEMS. Micro-cantilevers designed for biochemical applications have been fabricated using CVD diamond. In this work, the mechanical properties of these cantilevers were investigated by two different techniques: bending test using a Contact Surface Profilometer and resonant test, using a Laser Doppler Vibrometer. The Young’s Modulus of diamond thin film was estimated by these two tests. For the resonance test, the estimated values are comprised between 930 and 1300 GPa while bending test gives values between 950 and 1030 GPa. The load–displacement characteristics and the fracture point (or ultimate stress) have also been investigated.     

High aspect ratio diamond microelectrode array for neuronal activity measurements

Diamond exhibits several attractive properties for bio-sensing applications. In particular its high bio inertness, high electrochemical stability, and optical transparency provide diamond with high interests for neural activity study. The purpose of this study is the realisation of microelectrodes arrays (MEA) in diamond for neurons slices study. Due to a cellular lysis on the edge of the tissue slices studied, electrodes have to be at least 60 μm in height even though the electrode surface has to be minimised in order to achieve good signal noise rate. Silicon MEA with metal contacts were realised using (Deep Reactive Ion Etching) DRIE and coated with Nanocrystaline Diamond (NCD) using (Bias Enhanced Nucleation) BEN technique. We focus the study on the understanding of the BEN nucleation process on such high aspect ratio electrodes. Several parameters such as slope of the substrate, conductivity and chemical nature of the substrate were studied in order to enable selective nucleation necessary to fabricate diamond MEAs. The study leads to the optimised development of a processing route enabling the selective coating of the active tips of high aspect ratio MEAs without altering the electrical insulation between probes.     

V-shaped micromechanical tunable capacitors for RF applications

A new MEM varactor design is presented. It relies on the displacement of an isolated conductor in the air gap of a V-shaped capacitor. To estimate capacitance and tuning ratio of this structure the distributed point source method (DPSM) has been used for electrostatic simulations. The realisation and characterisation of glass motionless prototypes show the feasibility and the interest of this new concept for RF applications. To obtain actuated mobile devices, a novel silicon process has also been developed.     

A new design for rotational, tunable wideband RF MEMS capacitors

Wide range tunable components are a key point for high frequency performances. We have developed a novel RF MEMS rotational capacitor based on surface variation and high displacement. This paper will present multiple designs with physical parameter variations for comparative test with fabricated device measurements. The goal of this work is to prove the proper operation of the devices according to fulfill target performances. The main parameters will be tunability, capacitance value, resonance frequency and finally maximal actuation voltage allowed.     

SU-8 microchannels for live cell dielectrophoresis improvements

In this work a novel highly precise SU-8 fabrication technology is employed to construct microfluidic devices for sensitive dielectrophoretic (DEP) manipulation of budding yeast cells. A benchmark microfluidic live cell sorting system is presented, and the effect of microchannel misalignment above electrode topologies on live cell DEP is discussed in detail. Simplified model of budding Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast cell is presented and validated experimentally in fabricated microfluidic devices. A novel fabrication process enabling rapid prototyping of microfluidic devices with well-aligned integrated electrodes is presented and the process flow is described. Identical devices were produced with standard soft-lithography processes. In comparison to standard PDMS based soft-lithography, an SU-8 layer was used to construct the microchannel walls sealed by a flat sheet of PDMS to obtain the microfluidic channels. Direct bonding of PDMS to SU-8 surface was achieved by efficient wet chemical silanization combined with oxygen plasma treatment of the contact surface. The presented fabrication process significantly improved the alignment of the microstructures. While, according to the benchmark study, the standard PDMS procedure fell well outside the range required for reasonable cell sorting efficiency. In addition, PDMS delamination above electrode topologies was significantly decreased over standard soft-lithography devices. The fabrication time and costs of the proposed methodology were found to be roughly the same.