Electric field sensing characteristics of ZnO/SiO2/Si surface acoustic wave devices

Existing microelectro mechanical systems (MEMSs) electric field sensors have movable parts and electronic components. The movable parts are susceptible to external vibration, and the electronic components distort the distribution of the measured electric field. Therefore, we proposed a novel MEMS electric field sensor based on surface acoustic wave (SAW) technology. The SAW electric field sensor is a delay line device with an interdigital transducer and a reflector. The substrate of the device is a ZnO/SiO2/Si multilayer structure. The ZnO piezoelectric layer is not only used as the propagation medium of SAW, but also used as the sensing film of the external electric field. Then, the external electric field could be detected by analyzing the change of the eigenfrequency of the SAW. The multilayer structure of the substrate was prepared by MEMS process. The interdigital transducer and the reflector are fabricated by the lift-off process. The SAW sensor is characterized at different external electric field strengths by a network analyzer. The sensitivity of the sensor was 0.23 kHz/(kV m(-1)) and the nonlinearity was 6.8%.