Investigation of Silicon Etching Effects for Monolithic Integration of MEMS with CMOS

Monolithic integration of CMOS and MEMS is quickly proving to be a viable asset to current complex structures. However, synthesis of these technologies has proven to have multiple processing obstacles. Depending on the method used to create these devices, the hurdles include the effects of silicon etching and high temperature processing. For this experiment, previously processed CMOS wafers were obtained and a trench was etched into the silicon. “Family of curves” plots of the working CMOS wafers were taken before and after processing to study any changes in ID. Results have shown that the processing of this integration will effect the family of curve plots, however this was not concluded as a result of a small sample size