Lateral electrostatic accelerometer using Radioisotope Powered Electron Lithography

We used RadioIsotope Powered Electron Lithography (RIPEL), a new radioisotope emission-based electron lithography technique we recently presented, to fabricate a representative MEMS accelerometer. Because of nanoscale lithography dimensional control, the device shows high degree of dimensional matching (1-5%) between several devices. Moreover, measured accelerometer beam edge roughness is small (±10 nm), which leads to the consistency between the measured pull-in-voltage and the theoretical calculation value. Furthermore, the small average deviation on the beam width (±15 nm) leads to good pull-in-voltage uniformity from device to device (1-5%). Therefore, we demonstrate feasibility of using RIPEL to fabricate MEMS devices at nanoscale, with high precision, over large substrate for reduced cost.