Abstract
This work presents the CMOS micromachined dielectric cantilevers with integrated sharp tips for surface temperature measurement. The integrated cantilever can perform electrothermal actuation and piezoresistive sensing for maintaining a proper tip-sample contact. For the cantilever of 280-μm long, the measured thermoelectric power from the aluminum/polysilicon thermocouple is 22.6±0.36 μV/°C, the measured time constant is 796 μs, and the drift due to thermal actuation is 0.15±0.057 μV/°C. The measured displacement by thermal actuation is 2.2 μm at 17.8 mW and the measured thermal time constant is 79.6 μs. The measured piezoresistive sensitivity and pre-amp noise are 0.48 mV/μm and 0.7 μV/Hz 1/2 , respectively, producing an equivalent input-referred noise displacement of 1.45 nm/Hz 1/2 . © 2008 IEEE.