Tesis doctoral de Josep MontanyÁ Silvestre
The ultimate goal of this thesis has been to make research on some novel mems technology with a commercial interest, and to setup a company to fully develop and commercialize it. initial research was based on a novel micro-relay concept, named freeplate, which was intended to reduce the actuation voltage, by means of not using a mechanical spring to recover the initial state, but rather using electrostatic actuation in both directions, so that no spring was necessary. To develop this concept special mems processes were used, as it is common with mst. later it was realized that using a standard cmos process was much more appealing from a commercial point of view. Thus the research was focused on how to build mems devices this way. This lead to the technology called nanoemstm. finally, many applications or products that can be developed using this nanoems processing technology have been investigated. In fact, many of them can be technically built using other processes, but taking advantage of cmos processing gives always the best cost and integration advantage, and hence it becomes a necessity in practice to achieve a compelling product to be sold in the real market. in addition to all this technical research, i have setup a company called baolab microsystems. This has allowed me to have the required funds to make all this research, and it will enable now the commercialization of this technology. the structure of the thesis is as follows. There is a first chapter explaining the micromachining processes being used. This is followed by seven chapters, each one dealing with a different application. One on rf switches, which contains the initial freeplatetm concept, one on rf filters, another one for vibrating antennas, another one about non-volatile memories, another one on motion sensors, one on power converters and finally one on integrated passives. at the end there are two annexes, one explaining the history of baolab and summarizing the current status, and another one summarizing the patent portfolio generated during the thesis. Although only one publication has been made, due to the need to keep secrecy on many advances to help in the patent prosecution process, there has been an intense activity in patent filings. rather than going very deep in the analysis of a single application, the approach of the thesis has been to analyze many of them, but not digging so much. In that sense, i believe that this thesis has opened several new areas that are worth many more thesis and research in the years coming. Some examples are vibrating antennas, thermo-magnetic rf switches, filters and antennas and, mechanical capacitors and inductors, and modulating rectifiers.
Datos académicos de la tesis doctoral «Cmos processing for mems devices and their applications«
- Título de la tesis: Cmos processing for mems devices and their applications
- Autor: Josep MontanyÁ Silvestre
- Universidad: Politécnica de catalunya
- Fecha de lectura de la tesis: 18/01/2012
Dirección y tribunal
- Director de la tesis
- Luis Castañer Muñoz
- Tribunal
- Presidente del tribunal: ramón Alcubilla gonzález
- aleksandr Chekhovskiy (vocal)
- arthur Morris (vocal)
- markus Ulm (vocal)