SAPIENT: Services for Advanced Piezoelectric Integrated Electronic Nanosystems Technology

At present, there is no USA-based foundry MPW service for advanced piezoelectric MEMS. There is an opportunity to revolutionize electronics and intelligent microsystems by providing a widely applicable piezoelectric MEMS process to the US R&D community, focusing on providing a secure option for Department of Defense demand. This project will develop CMOS integrated piezoelectric MEMS for academic, commercial, and DOD customers. The MPW will be supported by a PDK (Process Design Kit) that allows users to design piezoelectric Micro/Nano systems, including MEMS and CMOS circuitry, to control the devices. The PDK will be developed via fabrication runs using force kinds of base substrates and enable device topologies to enable a vast majority of piezoelectric devices. Released and solidly mounted piezoelectric devices will be enabled, allowing for the development of resonators, filters, piezoelectric micromachined transducers, gigahertz transducers all in one process flow. This project will also develop CMOS circuits that can be used to drive and sense the piezoelectric transducer for rapid integration of monolithic piezoelectric devices with CMOS. This level integration of multiple MEMS devices in CMOS has not been possible before and will enable orders of magnitude reduction in size, weight, and power of DOD microsystems. The integration level will open the possibility of the circuits community to utilize the PDK and push the frontiers of More-than-Moore and edge-sense-compute paradigms.