Integration of a technique for the deposition of nanostructured films with MEMS-based microfabrication technologies: application to micro gas sensors

During the last years nanotechnology has lead to the development of new methods of material deposition that have the very interesting feature of finely controlling the nanostructure of deposited thin films, tailoring the material properties to application-specific needs. One of the big challenges in the near future is to couple these deposition techniques to mature microfabrication technologies in order to realize microdevices with unique features that arise from the nano-world. Here we present a new method for the direct integration of nanostructured metal oxide layers on micromachined silicon platform batches, for the realization of solid-state conductometric gas sensors. Two cases have been investigated: deposition of nanostructured WO3 on microhotplate arrays and deposition of nanostructured Fe2O3 on microbridges