Electrical & Computer Engineering     |     Carnegie Mellon

Tuesday, December 4, 12:15-1:15 p.m. HH-1112

 

Chiung C. Lo
Carnegie Mellon University

CMOS-MEMS Resonators for Mixer-Filter Applications

Over the last decades, following Gordon Moore's prediction, integrated circuits (IC) double the computing power approximately every year and a half, at no increase in cost per IC, ignited the revolution of personal computers in 70s and mobile phones in 80s. However, nowadays high speed ICs of transceivers still need off-chip components to provide narrow band filtering and stable reference frequency. That becomes a bottleneck toward further miniaturization of wireless communication systems and drives the search for on-chip high quality factor microresonators.

In this talk, I propose a new type of Complementary-Metal-Oxide-Silicon (CMOS) Micro-Electrical-Mechanical-System (MEMS) capacitive microresonators performing both highly selective filtering and frequency mixing in one device, called mixer-filters (mixfilters). The importance and the benefit of CMOS MEMS-based mixfilter technology will be discussed and the challenges preventing their implementation will be reviewed.

Bio:

Chiung C. Lo received his M.S. from the Power Mechanical Engineering Department of National Tsing-Hua University (NTHU) in Taiwan in 2000, where he studied and designed a novel out-of-plane electrothermal microactuator for optical communication applications. From 2000 to 2003, he joined Touch Microsystem Technology in Taiwan, where he established the dry etching process module and contributed to the process development and integration of above-CMOS high quality factor inductors for wireless transceiver front-ends. Currently he is a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University under Prof. Gary K. Fedder and affiliated with MEMS Laboratory. His research interests are in the areas of RF CMOS MEMS mixfilters, oscillators, microsensors, microactuators, and analog integrated circuits for interfacing MEMS devices.