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A. Camarda, M. Tartagni, G. Sordo, J. Iannacci, M. Schneider, U. Schmid, A. Romani:
"Smoothing The Way Towards Miniaturized MEMS AlN-based Piezoelectric Transformers";
Talk: IEEE Sensors 2017, Glasgow, Schottland; 10-29-2017 - 11-01-2017; in: "IEEE Sensors 2017 - Proceedings", IEEE, (2017), ISBN: 978-1-5090-1012-7; 1 - 3.

This work presents the electromechanical
characterization and design of a Piezoelectric Transformer (PT)
made on a Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) structure through a bulk
micromachining process exploiting low-frequency flexuralmodes.
The footprint area of the device is less than 3.5 mm2. The
purpose of this work is to show the enhancement obtained with
respect to prior state of the art in terms of quality factor and
voltage gain for the fundamental mode. As matter of fact, the
presented device, achieves Q-factor ~71 at environmental
pressure, being almost 6 times greater with respect to the one of
the same membrane with double radius and almost 4X footprint
area. The step-up ratio at environmental pressure is ~25mV/V,
but it increases at 250mV/V when the device is operated in a
vacuum chamber, thus being more than 20X times higher the
step-up ratio achieved for the same membrane with double
radius in vacuum environment.

This work presents the electromechanical
characterization and design of a Piezoelectric Transformer (PT)
made on a Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) structure through a bulk
micromachining process exploiting low-frequency flexuralmodes.
The footprint area of the device is less than 3.5 mm2. The
purpose of this work is to show the enhancement obtained with
respect to prior state of the art in terms of quality factor and
voltage gain for the fundamental mode. As matter of fact, the
presented device, achieves Q-factor ~71 at environmental
pressure, being almost 6 times greater with respect to the one of
the same membrane with double radius and almost 4X footprint
area. The step-up ratio at environmental pressure is ~25mV/V,
but it increases at 250mV/V when the device is operated in a
vacuum chamber, thus being more than 20X times higher the
step-up ratio achieved for the same membrane with double
radius in vacuum environment.