Sub-milliwatt integrated oven for temperature stable laterally vibrating piezoelectric MEMS resonators

This paper reports the design and demonstration of an integrated oven for aluminum nitride (AlN) piezoelectric MEMS resonators that enables device heating from -40°C to +85°C with a power consumption as low as 368μW - the lowest ever recorded for MEMS resonators. The same resonators exhibit quality factors (Q) as high as 4,459. In this work, RF power delivery is decoupled from resonator supporting beams, hence alleviating the trade-off between power consumption and Q-factor; moreover, heaters are placed externally to the resonator body, hence eliminating the deleterious effects of serpentines on the acoustic properties of the device. More importantly, this ovenization technique is independent of the resonator geometry, so it is broadly applicable to any resonator frequency (70MHz to 1.16GHz in this work). This demonstration constitutes a fundamental stepping stone in enabling temperature stable oscillators with extremely low power consumption.