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JOURNAL OF MICROELECTROMECHANICAL SYSTEMS 1

Fully Differential Actuation and Sensing in

Piezoelectric Diaphragm Resonators for High
Signal to Background Resonant Sensing
Sudhanshu Tiwari , Student Member, IEEE, Randhir Kumar, Student Member, IEEE,
Saurabh Arun Chandorkar , Member, IEEE, and
Rudra Pratap , Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract— We report a successful realization of a self-actuating resonators has been used for artificial enhancement of quality
and self-sensing piezoelectric diaphragm resonator for sensing factor [1], characterization of cantilevers [6], and maintaining
applications with high signal to background ratio (SBR). A fully a constant displacement of a cantilever [7]. Piezoelectric
differential electrode topology is designed for actuation of the
diaphragm in the first flexural mode, and for simultaneously thin film-based MEMS resonators offer good in-air/in-liquid
sensing the resulting vibrational response. The electrical (sense) quality factor and, hence, are the right candidate for resonant
outputs from the resonator (of radius 1000 µm and thickness sensing. Several resonant sensors for the measurement of fluid
25 µm) in two different experimental arrangements — partial properties (density and viscosity) have been reported in the lit-
differential and fully differential — are compared with the erature [8]–[16]. Out of these, [13]–[16] have used self-sensing
mechanical vibration response obtained from a laser Doppler
vibrometer. The effect of poling on electrical crosstalk for the and self-actuating piezoelectric resonators. Since the design
fully differential operation is investigated. The resonator suffers of these devices necessitates the closely spaced actuator and
from electrical crosstalk even in fully differential operation sensor electrodes, the feedthrough capacitor formed between
when characterized without poling the PZT thin film. The sense these electrodes causes electrical crosstalk. The electrical
output from the resonator after poling, when actuated using a signal corresponding to mechanical vibration is often buried
differential electrical input of 0.5 Vpp, is measured both in-air
and in liquids of different densities. In the self-sensing mode, in this noise. As a solution, an on-chip compensation method
the peak output from the device at the first flexural mode and the corresponding electronic circuitry was reported by
resonance is 2-3 mV in different density liquids and ∼9 mV Chu et al. [17]. Since this method utilizes a previously
in air. The resonator is also characterized as a resonant sensor designed compensation capacitor, it is not suitable for different
for liquid density measurements. The sensitivity of the device fluidic applications where the high dielectric constant of fluids
is found to be 11.9 Hz/(kg/m3 ). The corresponding sensitivity
in parts per million is calculated to be ∼454 ppm/(kg/m3) introduces additional crosstalk. Recently, the use of a dummy
with the resonance frequency in DI water (26.3 kHz) as the device for the cancellation of electrical crosstalk was reported
reference. [2020-0137] by Toledo et al. [14]. In this report, the electrical signal from
Index Terms— Fully differential, self-sensing PiezoMEMS actu- an unreleased device with the same electrode configuration
ator, piezoelectric diaphragm. was subtracted from the signal obtained from the actual device.
Although this method works well, the cost of fabrication per
working device is twice the cost of a device that can achieve
I. I NTRODUCTION
on-chip cancellation.

P IEZOELECTRIC MEMS actuators/sensors utilize an

active piezoelectric thin film sandwiched between a top
and a bottom electrode, on top of a passive structural layer.
To achieve the cancellation of the crosstalk for high signal to
background ratio (SBR), an on-chip differential electrode con-
figuration is a good alternative. A resonant mass sensor based
Since the underlying architecture of an actuator and a sensor on piezoelectric diaphragms with differential electrodes was
is the same, the electrodes/thin film can be divided into the reported by Hu et al. [18]. However, their report mentions that
desired number of parts to achieve simultaneous actuation and the electrical characterization of the device was not possible in
sensing of the structure. In general, the self-actuating and self- a liquid. Recently, a fully differential electrode configuration
sensing (SASS) capability of resonators finds application in has been utilized for a disk resonator vibrating in a higher-
standalone resonant sensors [1]–[5] and closed-loop feedback order shear mode [19]. Although the shear mode resonator
control of resonators. The feedback control capability of these offers a very high quality factor, independent measurements of
fluid density and viscosity are impossible because the resonant
Manuscript received May 6, 2020; accepted June 4, 2020. This work was
supported by the Indian Institute of Science. Subject Editor M. Rais-Zadeh. frequency of shear modes depends on the product of density
(Corresponding author: Sudhanshu Tiwari.) and viscosity [18].
The authors are with the Centre for Nano Science and Engineering, Indian Most of the MEMS-based fluid property sensors in the
Institute of Science, Bengaluru 560012, India (e-mail: [email protected];
[email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]). literature utilize cantilevers. Since a cantilever suffers from
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JMEMS.2020.3001246 a significant reduction in its Q-factor in liquids, higher-order
1057-7157 © 2020 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/index.html for more information.

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2 JOURNAL OF MICROELECTROMECHANICAL SYSTEMS

Fig. 1. (a) Stress distribution on a diaphragm resonator in the first

flexural mode. (b) Optical image of the fabricated diaphragm resonator with
differential electrodes in oppositely stressed regions.

modes of vibration have been utilized [15] in order to achieve

a higher Q-factor [20]. The diaphragms, on the other hand, are
expected to undergo a relatively small reduction in Q because
they can be made to contact the liquid only on one side.
In a previous report, our group has reported a diaphragm-
based density sensor where ultrasonic waves generated from a
distant PMUT array were used for the actuation of the sensing
diaphragm [12]. To the best of our knowledge, there is no Fig. 2. Illustration of the process flow used for the fabrication of the
report on fully differential SASSs with diaphragm resonators. diaphragm. (a) PZT deposited on an oxidized SOI wafer. (b) Patterned top
In an earlier report, we have shown that the diaphragm electrode deposition. (c) Wet etching of PZT thin film. (d) Wet etching of the
bottom electrode (Pt and Ti) and dry etching of SiO2 . (e) Patterning of the
resonators suffer from huge crosstalk when two electrodes device layer of the SOI wafer. (f) Patterning of the handle layer of the SOI
located in oppositely strained regions are utilized for self- wafer from the backside and (g) SiO2 etch to release the device. ∗ Figure not
sensing [21]. In this paper, we report the same diaphragm to scale.

resonator vibrating in the first flexural mode (0,1) with fully

differential electrodes for simultaneous actuation and sensing shown in Fig. 1(b). A suitable gap between the electrodes was
of the diaphragm vibration. The results from partially differen- chosen to account for the alignment error in microfabrication.
tial and fully differential operation are presented. The device
was also tested as a standalone liquid density sensor while III. E XPERIMENTAL S ECTION
operating in a fully differential mode. A. Device Fabrication
II. T HEORY AND D ESIGN The resonators were fabricated by following a general
micromachining process suitable for the fabrication of dif-
A fully differential actuation and sensing scheme is expected ferent devices on a single wafer. The detailed fabrication
to overcome the issue of the feedthrough signal by canceling it methodology can be found in our earlier report [22]. A brief
out. For this kind of operation of any SASS, 4 top electrodes description of the fabrication process is given here. The fabri-
are required — two for actuation and two for sensing. The cation starts with an oxidized silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer.
actuation electrodes are supplied with an antiphase electrical The wafer is then coated with Pt and PZT thin films. The
signal, and the signal from the sensing electrodes are sub- patterned deposition of the top electrode (Cr-Au) is achieved
tracted, usually by a differential amplifier. In order to achieve using a lift-off process. Both the PZT thin film and the Pt
the fully differential operation for piezoelectric resonators, bottom electrode were patterned by a wet chemical method
the two actuation electrodes must be located such that they using different chemistries. The thermal oxide is patterned by
enable the desired mode of vibration when supplied with reactive ion etching. The device and the handle layer of the
the antiphase electrical signal. In addition, the two sense SOI wafer are patterned by deep reactive ion etching (DRIE).
electrodes must be located in different strain/stress regions. The devices are released by etching the buried oxide using
Moreover, the feedthrough capacitor formed between the actu- RIE. The masks for DRIE are designed in such a way that the
ation and sensing electrodes should have the same capacitance resulting devices are singulated at the end of the process. The
value. fabrication process is shown schematically in Fig. 2.
The stress distribution for a fixed-edge diaphragm vibrating
in the first flexural mode (0,1) is shown in Fig. 1(a). Based
on the stress profile, an electrode topology for the fully B. Characterization
differential operation of the resonator was designed. Since The fabricated devices were tested for their vibrational
the diaphragm vibration is symmetric, the two feedthrough response using a laser Doppler vibrometer (MSA-500 Polytec
capacitors are expected to have the same capacitance. This Gmbh). The electrical characterization was performed using
results in an equal feedthrough signal to both the sensing a lock-in amplifier (MFLI) from Zurich Instruments. The
electrodes that can be subtracted through the common-mode mechanical vibration response (from LDV) and the electri-
rejection. An optical image of the fully differential resonator is cal response (from the lock-in amplifier) were compared.

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TIWARI et al.: FULLY DIFFERENTIAL ACTUATION AND SENSING IN PIEZOELECTRIC DIAPHRAGM RESONATORS 3

Fig. 3. Characterization setup for vibration measurement (a) Device under

test for mechanical vibration using laser Doppler vibrometer. (b) Experimental
arrangement for electrical measurement using a lock-in amplifier. For fully
differential measurements, all switches are closed.

These experiments were carried out in the air and in liquids

of different densities. The liquids were obtained by preparing
solutions of varying concentrations of glycerol in deionized
water. The glycerol water solution was chosen as the test fluid
because the properties (density and viscosity) of these solu-
tions can be easily found from the literature. The devices were
mounted on a custom-made metal header for characterization.
The header had an open cavity to accommodate the test fluid.
The experimental arrangement for vibration measurement is
shown in Fig. 3(a). The inset image in Fig. 3(a) shows a liquid-
filled cavity with the device under test. For the mechanical
vibration measurements, the diaphragm was excited using an
antiparallel electrical input to the A+ and A− electrodes
(marked on the image in Fig. 1(b)). For the fully differential
Fig. 4. Effect of poling of the PZT thin film on the performance of
electrical measurements, the four top electrodes — two for the fully differential resonator. Poling of the PZT film not only results in
actuation and two for sensing — were connected as follows: an improvement in the signal amplitude but also results in better crosstalk
A+ and A− electrodes were used for differential actuation by cancellation, as evident from the near-perfect phase difference measured
across the peak.
applying an antiphase excitation voltage from the output of
the lock-in amplifier. The S+ and S− are sense electrodes for
differential sensing, and they were connected to differential A. Effect of Poling of the PZT Thin Film
input ports of the lock-in amplifier. This arrangement is illus-
trated in Fig. 3(b) with all 4 switches closed. It is important Fig. 4 shows a comparison between the electrical responses
to note that no signal conditioning circuit was used between measured before and after the poling of the PZT thin film.
the device and the lock-in amplifier. We can see that the output is superimposed with a linearly
increasing crosstalk signal for the experiment carried out
before poling. This is a general characteristic of capacitive
C. Poling of PZT Thin Film coupling between the actuation and the sense electrodes.
PZT is a ferroelectric material. The electric dipoles in a Additionally, an essential characteristic of a resonance peak
ferroelectric material are randomly oriented. In order to get — a phase difference of close to π radians — is not observed.
maximum performance, such materials must be poled. The For the measurement carried out before poling, the phase
PZT thin film on the device was poled by applying an electric difference is just about 1 radian across the peak. In contrast,
field across the PZT thin film. During the poling process, all a near-perfect peak with a phase difference of ∼ π radians is
4 top electrodes were supplied with a DC voltage of 12 V, and obtained after poling of the PZT film.
the bottom electrode was kept grounded. Poling of the PZT thin results in higher electromechanical
coupling. This results in a lower motional impedance of the
electromechanical path. Consequently, the signal flowing via
IV. R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION the electromechanical path is higher than the capacitive feed-
The ideal sensing frequency response of a self-actuating forward route. Moreover, poling reduces the randomness in the
and self-sensing resonator without any crosstalk should pre- capacitance between the various electrodes giving rise to better
cisely follow the mechanical vibration frequency response. cancellation via fully differential operation. Furthermore, pol-
This allows for accurate measurement of resonance frequency ing results in the alignment of electrical dipoles in the field
and quality factor of the resonating device. In this section, direction, which results in increased relative permittivity in
we discuss the performance of the resonator in different the poling direction [23]. Since poling is carried out using the
experimental configurations. top and bottom electrodes, the feedthrough capacitor remains

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4 JOURNAL OF MICROELECTROMECHANICAL SYSTEMS

Fig. 5. Comparison between the mechanical vibration response (measured

using LDV) and the fully differential electrical self-sensing response of the
resonator for in-air vibrations.

mostly unaffected, but the capacitance of actuator and sensor

capacitors is expected to increase. Increased capacitance of the
sensor capacitor results in a reduced feedthrough signal. Thus,
these two effects of poling result in the near-perfect resonant
peak of the electrical output.

B. In-Air Measurements
The in-air mechanical vibration response (vibration velocity
measured using LDV) and the fully differential self-sensing
response (measured using the lock-in amplifier) are plotted
together in Fig. 5.
The first flexural mode resonance of the resonator was Fig. 6. The self-sensing response of the resonator in partial differential and
found at approximately 81 kHz, and the corresponding quality fully differential configurations (see Fig. 3(b) for switch arrangements).
factor was found to be ∼100. The self-sensing response of
the resonator closely followed the vibration response obtained the small peak. In the differential sense mode, the capaci-
from the LDV, which is desirable for any resonant sensor. tive feedthrough dominates the signal, as suggested by the
Both resonance frequency and quality factor from electrical pi/2 phase lead before and after the resonance. Close to
measurements match well with the LDV measurements. There the resonance, however, the signal increases at the opposite
is a slight difference between the electrical and the mechanical phase of the capacitive feedthrough, which creates a notch in
responses (see inset in Fig. 5). This can be attributed to the transfer characteristic. Only the fully differential configu-
a slight difference between the capacitors, perhaps resulting ration of self-sensing measurements follows the mechanical
from fabrication imperfections such as slight misalignment vibrational response of the resonator. Moreover, the fully
and/or non-uniform material properties of the thin film. differential response has the recorded phase difference of ∼ π
1) Partial Differential vs. Fully Differential Operation: radians across the resonance. Based on these observations,
For comparison, the self-sensing response was also measured experiments in a liquid medium were carried out in the fully
in two partial differential configurations illustrated by switch differential configuration only.
arrangement in Fig. 3(b). These configurations were: (a) dif-
ferential actuation configuration, where the two actuation
electrodes were supplied with an antiphase electrical input, C. Measurement in Liquids
and the output was recorded from a single sensing electrode Fig. 7 shows the frequency response of the resonator
(switch S2 open), and (b) differential sensing configuration, vibrating in a test fluid (20% glycerol by volume dissolved
where one of the actuation electrodes was supplied with the in DI water). Mechanical vibration and electrical self-sensing
electrical input and the differential output was recorded from responses, along with the phase-plot from electrical measure-
the two sensing electrodes (switch S4 open). Fig. 6 shows ments, are shown in the same figure.
the recorded responses from the two configurations. For the As in the case of air, the electrical response follows the
differential actuation configuration, the resonance peak was mechanical response. Since the fully differential self-sensing
found to be buried in the background noise from the electrical (electrical) response closely follows the mechanical resonance
crosstalk, and there was hardly any phase difference across response, it is suitable to use this for any resonant sensing

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TIWARI et al.: FULLY DIFFERENTIAL ACTUATION AND SENSING IN PIEZOELECTRIC DIAPHRAGM RESONATORS 5

PZT thin film is essential for the desired performance of the

fabricated self-sensing resonator. Our experiments with partial
differential arrangements of actuation and sensing reveal that it
is crucial to exploit the symmetry in the vibration modes of the
diaphragm, which results in near-perfect crosstalk cancellation
both in air and in the liquid medium. The resonator is suitable
for resonant sensing for different stimuli. Here, we have
demonstrated a fully differential diaphragm resonator as a fluid
density sensor.

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6 JOURNAL OF MICROELECTROMECHANICAL SYSTEMS

[18] Z. Hu et al., “Design, fabrication and characterization of a piezoelec- Saurabh Arun Chandorkar (Member, IEEE)
tric MEMS diaphragm resonator mass sensor,” J. Micromech. Micro- received the B.Tech. degree in mechanical engineer-
eng., vol. 23, no. 12, Dec. 2013, Art. no. 125019, doi: 10.1088/0960- ing from IIT Bombay in 2003, and the M.S. and
1317/23/12/125019. Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering minoring
[19] A. Ali and J. E.-Y. Lee, “Fully differential piezoelectric button-like in electrical engineering from Stanford University
mode disk resonator for liquid phase sensing,” IEEE Trans. Ultrason., in 2004 and 2009, respectively. From 2009 to 2010,
Ferroelectr., Freq. Control, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 600–608, Mar. 2019, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow of adaptive nanoim-
doi: 10.1109/TUFFC.2018.2872923. print lithography with the Electrical Engineering
[20] A. K. Pandey and R. Pratap, “Effect of flexural modes on squeeze Department, Stanford University. He was with the
film damping in MEMS cantilever resonators,” J. Micromech. Micro- Research and Development Group, Intel Mask Pro-
eng., vol. 17, no. 12, pp. 2475–2484, Nov. 2007, doi: 10.1088/0960- duction Facility, for six years, where his efforts were
1317/17/12/013. directed toward providing complete turn-key solutions for newly emergent
[21] S. Tiwari, R. Kumar, P. K. Menon, A. Antony Jeyaseelan, S. Dutta, issues in 1276 and 1278 nodes. In 2017, he joined Stanford University as a
and R. Pratap, “On the realization of self-sensing piezoelectric MEMS Lecturer. In 2017, he joined IISc, Bangalore, as an Assistant Professor, where
actuators,” in Proc. Int. Conf. Manipulation, Autom. Robot. Small Scales, he conducts research on microelectromechanical system/NEMS with a special
Jul. 2019, pp. 1–5. interest in resonators, packaging solutions, and advanced system development.
[22] S. Tiwari, A. Dangi, and R. Pratap, “Enabling fabrication of PZT based He was a recipient of two Intel Logic Technology Development Divisional
piezoMEMS devices,” in Proc. Sensors, Dec. 2018, pp. 1–4. awards.
[23] V. Kovaä and J. Brianäin, “Effect of poling process on the
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doi: 10.1080/00150199708228319.

Sudhanshu Tiwari (Student Member, IEEE)

received the B.Tech. degree in mechanical engi-
neering from A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Technical Uni-
versity, Lucknow, India, in 2015. He is currently
Rudra Pratap (Senior Member, IEEE) received
pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the Centre for
the B.Tech. degree (Hons.) from IIT Kharagpur,
Nano Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of
Kharagpur, India, in 1985, the M.S. degree from
Science, Bengaluru, India. His research interests
The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA,
include PiezoMEMS design, microfabrication, and
in 1987, and the Ph.D. degree from Cornell Uni-
vibrational analysis of MEMS structures.
versity, Ithaca, NY, USA, in 1993. He taught at
the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace
Engineering, Cornell University, from 1994 to 1996.
Randhir Kumar (Student Member, IEEE) received In 1996, he joined the Department of Mechanical
the B.Tech. degree in manufacturing engineer- Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru,
ing from the National Institute of Foundry and as an Assistant Professor, where he served full time
Forge Technology, Ranchi, India, in 2009, and from 1996 to 2010. He moved to the Centre for Nano Science and Engi-
the M.Tech. degree in production engineering neering (CeNSE) as a Professor and the Founding Chairperson. He continues
from Delhi Technological University, Delhi, India, as an Associate Faculty Member of mechanical engineering. He has been
in 2014. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree the Deputy Director of the Indian Institute of Science since August 2018.
with the Centre for Nano Science and Engineer- His research interests include microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and
ing, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, India. NEMS, vibroacoustics, bioacoustics, mechanobiology, and computational
His research interests include, material growth and mechanics. Dr. Pratap is an Elected Fellow of the National Academy of
characterization, microwave assisted growth process, Engineering and the National Academy of Science. He is an Associate Editor
Piezo-MEMS design, microfabrication, vibrational analysis of microelectro- of the IEEE/ASME J OURNAL OF M ICROELECTROMECHANICAL S YSTEMS
mechanical system (MEMS) structures, machine learning, and AI. and the Journal of Institute of Smart Structures & Systems (ISSS).

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