| Project Detail |
"Chip-scale magnetometers come in several flavors, the most common being silicon Hall-effect plates that integrate easily with electronics. However, these devices only detect 1D fields, are asymmetric between X-Y and Z directions, and cannot work in extreme temperatures. My goal is to leverage my expertise in micromachining and wide-bandgap semiconductor Hall-plates to realize magnetometers with a unique ""3D"" microstructure that uses 10% of the space of existing ""3x1D"" sensors, and is 3-10x more accurate. This enables new products for 3D navigation in autonomous microsystems such as biomedical implants, power monitoring, and nanosatellites.
This proposal will involve the development of the inverted pyramid device through crystallographic etching of <100> CMOS silicon to expose the <111> crystal plane at 54.7°. This enables higher angular accuracy and avoids fabrication misalignment or packaging errors. The <111> also supports direct GaN and other 3D Material integration with CMOS chips. In parallel, the host group, the Electronics Instrumentation(EI) laboratory at TU Delft, will develop the CMOS integrated circuit for front-end amplification and switching scheme of the sensor to detect all three components of the field from a singular device. The EI lab is top-ranked in circuits design and complements my sensor development activities seamlessly.
The final year of the project will focus on testing these chips packaged together and development of a integrated single chip with both sensor and circuit to reveal improved performance with the use of graphene as the device layer. This project will open up future work with (ultra) wide-bandgap material integration using GaN and/or Diamond to enable extreme-environment navigation sensors with exotic applications in high temperature environments.
The project will improve my career prospects as a tenure-track professor with training in circuits, teaching and tenure-track professional development at TU Delft." |
