Design and Simulation of Clamped-Clamped and Clamped-Free Resonators

Ahmad Anwar Zainuddin1,  Jamilah Karim2,  Anis Nurashikin Nordin2,  Mohanraj Soundara Pandian1,  Sheroz Khan2
1Silterra, 2IIUM


Abstract

To date, there has been interest to design the MicroElectroMechanical System (MEMS) integrated with Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) resonator for RF integrated circuits. This work presents the design of Clamped-Clamped and Clamped-free beam resonators. These resonators will be fabricated using commercial CMOS technology and are intended to replace current off-chip resonators. These resonators provide on-chip low cost solutions for devices with much reduced chip area, besides having considerably reduced insertion losses due to external bond wires. They can be integrated with amplifiers to form oscillators for generating clocks in the 20MHz range. The resonators require approximately 70V DC and 10mV AC to electrostatically actuate the resonator’s beams. The actuation is simulated and measured using Finite modeling software of COMSOL (Multiphysics 4.2) to obtain optimum design parameters. This paper makes a comparative review of different models for evaluating the designed resonator’s performance in terms of resonance frequency, total capacitance, and total displacement.