Fabrication of piezodriven, free-standing, all-oxide heteroepitaxial cantilevers on silicon

We report on the fabrication and mechanical properties of all-oxide, free-standing, heteroepitaxial, piezoelectric, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) on silicon, using PbZr0.52Ti0.48O3 as the key functional material. The fabrication was enabled by the development of an epitaxial lift-off strategy for the patterning of multilayer oxide heterostructures grown on Si(001), employing a high temperature stable, sacrificial oxide template mask to obtain freestanding cantilever MEMS devices after substrate etching. All cantilevers, with lengths in the range 25-325 mu m, width 50 mu m, and total thickness of 300 nm, can be actuated by an external AC-bias. For lengths 50-125 p.m, the second order bending mode formed the dominant resonance, whereas for the other lengths different or multiple modes were present. (C) 2014 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.