SOI and Engineered-SOI, ideal platforms for building MEMS

MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) have been developed over the past 40 years with ink jet, pressure sensor and accelerometers driving the technology. The last decade has particularly witnessed a tremendous commercial success of MEMS, addressing a plethora of functions such as screen orientation, gesture recognition, timing, voice input and location-based services. This success is the result of continually making these transducers including gyroscopes, accelerometers, resonators, microphones, and magnetometers smaller, lower power, more manufacturable, lower cost, more robust, and more functionally integrated. These characteristics, in turn, have come about by MEMS developers applying and extending the process technology used for fabrication of microelectronics. In fact, the wafer level batch processing has been the foundation of low-cost high-volume manufacturing of MEMS. Although a wide variety of materials are used in building MEMS, silicon has become the dominant choice due to its several useful properties. Single crystalline silicon (SCS) is particularly an excellent structural material for MEMS. SOI and Engineered SOI (ESOI) provide simple and elegant ways of creating transducers from SCS.