AN ARRAY OF MONOLITHIC FBAR-CMOS OSCILLATORS FOR MASS-SENSING APPLICATIONS.

Abstract

We present a monolithic, solidly-mounted CMOS-FBAR oscillator array for mass sensing applications. Thin-film bulk acoustic resonators (FBAR) are an effective platform for sensitive biological and chemical detection, where their high operating frequencies make them many times more sensitive than a quartz crystal microbalance. By monolithic integration with CMOS drive circuitry, we aim to overcome the spatial limitations of externally-coupled resonators to build dense sensor arrays without specialized fabrication techniques. The sensors in this work are constructed in a 6 × 4 array atop a 0.18μm CMOS active substrate, and mass sensitivity comparable to off-chip FBAR sensors is demonstrated.