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Optical Characterization Technique for MEMS Comb-Drive Resonators

Y. SABRY, M. MEDHAT, B. SAADANY, A. SAFWAT AND D. KHALIL
combination of the motional parameters Rm, Cm and Lm and the other branch represents the gap capacitance Co. Additional series and parallel components can also be added to represent the electrical parasitic effects. Assuming the time constant of the electrical parasitic elements in conjunction with the capacitance Co is relatively small with respect to the mechanical time constant, an applied unit step voltage on the resonator, results in a displacement given by: (1) x (t ) = x1 + x2e ts sin(d t + cos 1 ) where x1 and x2 are constants and 0 < < 1 is the damping ratio,
Abstract A novel optical technique is proposed for the characterization of MEMS resonators. The proposed technique is based on measuring the response of the resonator (resonance frequency and quality factor) optically, which eliminates the electrical parasitic effects. The proposed technique was applied to a comb-drive resonator and the obtained results show good agreement with the standard electrical technique with 2-5% deviation in the resonance frequency and 2-10% in the quality factor. Index Terms Comb-Drive Resonator, Fabry-Prot Interferometer, MEMS Resonator, Optical Characterization, Quality Factor, Resonance Frequency

is the angular damped frequency and

is the angular natural frequency given by:

I. SUMMARY

omb drive actuators are essential elements in many MEMS applications such as in sensors or telecommunication fields [1-2]. They have been extensively studied in the last years where different actuators designs have been implemented in inertial as well as optical applications [3-4]. However, the characterization of MEMS comb actuators is a field that needs much more elaboration to overcome the parasitic effects, usually masking the intrinsic resonator performance [5]. On the characterization level, two parameters are usually required to extract the comb equivalent circuit, the resonance frequency and the damping ratio (or the quality factor). When measuring these parameters using standard electrical techniques (such as frequency sweeping or time domain response) we are usually suffering from the interference of the parasitic elements on the measurement results. In addition, in electrical characterization we measure the equivalent impedance without direct access to the comb displacement (which is the main output of the actuator). The proposed technique is based on applying a voltage step on the comb-drive resonator and measuring the reflected optical power from a moving mirror driven by the comb (and connected to it) as shown in Fig. 1. In this case, the damped mechanical oscillations of the comb-drive are translated to equivalent damped oscillations in the sensed optical power. The resonance frequency and the quality factor can thus be obtained by fitting the measured optical power to the theoretically estimated one. A MEMS resonator operating in one-port configuration has an equivalent electrical circuit that consists of two branches in parallel [6]. One of them is the series

= 2Rm

Cm 2 , d = s 1 and s = Lm

1 Lm C m

This is the typical response of a second order system from which system dynamics parameters can be extracted as shown in Fig. 3 (b). As the comb is driving the mirror in front of the fiber (see Fig. 1), the fiber-mirror combination can be considered as a low finesse Fiber Fabry-Prot Interferometer (FFPI) whose reflected power is approximated by [7]:

P ( x ) = PDC ( x ) + PAC ( x ) cos(

4 x

(2)

where is the laser wavelength, and PDC and PAC are both slowly varying functions of x with respect to the sinusoidal term. If x(t ) = xo + x(t ) such that x << xo , it can be shown that the reflected power will also have a time varying component proportional to x (t ) that can be written as: (3) P (t ) = Ae Bt sin( 2f d t + C ) where A , B , C and f d are constants to be obtained by curve fitting. To ensure the convergence toward real correct set of parameters in the fitting process, the least square fit with grid search algorithm, explained in details in Ref. [8], is adopted. The resonance frequency ( f s ) and the quality factor ( Q ) are thus obtained from the fitting parameters by the following equations:

fs =

f d2 +

B2

and

Q=

1 f s = 2 B

(4)

Y. Sabry, A. Safwat and D. Khalil are with Ain-Shams University, Faculty of engineering, 1El-Sarayt St. Abbassia, 11517, Cairo, Egypt, e-mail: ysabry@ieee.org B. Saadany, M. Medhat, and D. Khalil are with the MEMS Division of SiWare Systems, 3 Khalid Ibn Al-Waleed St., Heliopolis, Cairo 11361, Egypt. e-mail: bassam.saadany@si-ware.com.

Fig. 2 illustrates the setup used to measure the reflected power from the MEMS. Cleaved multi-mode fiber was used to construct the low finesse FFPI with the movable mirror of the MEMS resonator. The IR source wavelength and power were set at 1530 nm and 300 w respectively. The function generator was programmed to generate a staircase signal starting from 0 V up to 16 V with a step of 2 V. The number

978-1-4244-2382-8/09/$25.00 2009 IEEE

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of samples in the staircase signal was 1984 samples, 0.1ms each. The staircase voltage signal is shown in Fig. 3 (a). The measurement was repeated 100 times and their average were taken. Fig. 4 depicts the normalized reflected power (Pn) obtained from the staircase signal shown in Fig. 3 (a). The oscillations are clearly seen in the reflected power. For every voltage step, one can divide the optical power behavior into two regions as shown in the inset of Fig. 4, region 1 with the dashed (left) oval and region 2 with the solid one. Strange oscillations with non-monotonic envelope and non-constant frequency are identified in region 1. This corresponds to the motion of the mirror with large amplitude crossing the optical fringes. This region is not of interest because it does not satisfy the condition in (3). In contrast, monotonically decreasing oscillation envelope with constant oscillation frequency is found in region 2. Thus, region 2 corresponds to the oscillations in the mirror position that have small amplitude within a given fringe. The previously described curve-fitting methodology was applied to this region.

The extraction of the resonator parameters was avoided at too low or too high voltages to avoid mechanical nonlinearity [5]. The damped frequency grid was chosen in the range 390: 450 Hz with a step of 1 Hz. Table 1 summarizes the resonance frequencies and the quality factors obtained from curve-fitting. To verify the proposed technique, a comparison with the electrical characterization technique [5] is presented in Table 1. The results indicate a good agreement between the two techniques. The percentage difference ranges from 2% to 5% in the resonance frequency and from 2% to 10 % in the quality factor.

Fiber

Mirror Spring

Fig. 4 Normalized power reflected from the mirror driven by the combdrive. The inset is a zoom on the indicated area.
Comb-drive

Table 1 Resonance frequencies and quality factors obtained from both optical and electrical characterizations. Optical Electrical VB(V) Q Q f s (Hz) f s (Hz) 4 6 8 10 12 445 433 441 437 436 3.55 4.05 3.78 4.12 3.64 421 421 423 414 414 3.89 3.72 3.71 3.75 3.73

Fig.1 The comb structure moving a mirror in front of the fiber

Acknowledgment
This work has been partially supported by the ITIDA organization through the ITAC PDP Program.

References
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[2]

Fig. 2 Optical measurements setup

(a) (b)

[3] [4]

[5]

[6]

Fig. 3 (a) Staircase voltage signal applied to the comb-drive (b) Typical step response of a second order system

[7]

[8]

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