Realizing Area efficient Silicon Micro Structures Using Only Front End Bulk Micromachining

Front-end bulk micro machining is one of the proven techniques of making suspended microstructures and is highly adapted due to its simple and cost effective way of fabricating the devices. In this paper we propose novel geometric mask designs for achieving area efficient microstructures by front-end Silicon (Si) bulk micromachining. In this work we adapt the geometric mask design having a microstructure between two rectangular openings. These openings are aligned at 45 degrees to wafer prime flat of (100) silicon wafer and act as etch openings for front-end bulk micromachining. However rectangular openings lead to high silicon area consumption which makes the process unworthy. Therefore we proposed different geometries to minimize area consumption for achieving the same dimension of suspended structure. All these different geometries are simulated using Intellisuite FABSIM based physical simulator. We have observed more than 28 % reduction in foot print over recent literature and 80 % over the basic design used in this paper