SUMMARY

Microcantilevers with integrated heaters (Heated cantilevers) were originally developed for thermomechanical data storage application. Recently, heated cantilevers have shown outstanding opportunities for nanoscale manufacturing and metrology tools such as probe based nanolithography and nanoscale thermal analysis. These new applications demand strict requirements for precise temperature calibration and device characterization in mechanical, electrical, and thermal domain. The goal of this work is to fabricate and characterize microcantilever sensors with integrated heaters and construct novel metrology tools based on the microcantilevers. This study will focus on investigation of thermal, mechanical, and coupled behaviors of the microcantilever heaters under electrical heating. Raman spectroscopy will be introduced to measure local temperature and qualitative intrinsic stress with high spatial resolution and commercial Atomic force microscopy system will be used for mechanical characterization. Based on the understanding from the conventional U-shape heated cantilevers, microcantilever heaters for micro hotplate applications such as bio/chemical sensor and gas flow sensor will be design, fabricated and characterized. Finally, small array of microcantilever heaters with integrated piezoresistors will be design, fabricated, and characterized to maximize device functionality by in-situ deflection sensing during the heater operation.