Experimentally validated aluminum nitride based pressure, temperature and 3-axis acceleration sensors integrated on a single chip

This paper reports a unified fabrication process used to build multiple Aluminum Nitride (AlN) based micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) sensors on a single chip. A fully functional AlN-based sensor cluster has been demonstrated and is presented in this paper. This sensor cluster is a “five degree-of-freedom” cluster; it measures 3-axis acceleration, temperature and pressure fabricated on a 1 cm × 1 cm die. In addition to utilizing AlN as both the structural and active layer of the sensors, this work is novel because all sensors are fabricated in the same fabrication run.