SBIR-STTR Award

SAPIENT: Services for Advanced Piezoelectric Integrated Electronic Nanosystems Technology
Award last edited on: 9/3/2021

Sponsored Program
SBIR
Awarding Agency
DOD : DARPA
Total Award Amount
$1,974,967
Award Phase
2
Solicitation Topic Code
HR001120S0019-003
Principal Investigator
Miguel Hernandez

Company Information

Geegah LLC

610 The Parkway
Ithaca, NY 14850
   (607) 319-0261
   info@geegah.com
   www.geegah.com
Location: Single
Congr. District: 23
County: Tompkins

Phase I

Contract Number: HR0011-20-C-0165
Start Date: 8/17/2020    Completed: 5/16/2021
Phase I year
2020
Phase I Amount
$224,967
Piezoelectric MEMS technology has wide applicability to implementing microsystems ranging from inertial sensors, RF-MEMS filters, integrated photonic optical modualtors, quantum communication chips, microfluidics, computation, and zero-power sensors for ioT applications. This work addresses the need to develop a process flow for implementing a wide variety of teh sub-components needed to implement systems, including integration on CMOS substrates. This effort will develop a piezoelectric MEMS process design kit to enable rapid and reproduce-able piezoelectric microsystems utilizing piezoelectric thin films. The effort will focus on the development of a process flow, design rules, scale-able device layouts, that a user can use to quickly implement microsystems. The designs will be compatible with a multi-user run process that will be implemented at the Cornell Nanoscale Facility and the Northeastern University cleanroom facility. The project will run the process flow to confirm the device parameters to develop accurate film properties and process limits. Prototype devices will be created for customers for test, as marketing for customers purchasing the devices, and to use the PDK to implement proprietary designs for product lines.

Phase II

Contract Number: HR0011-21-C-0191
Start Date: 7/30/2021    Completed: 7/29/2023
Phase II year
2021
Phase II Amount
$1,750,000
At present, there is no USA-based foundry MPW service for advanced piezoelectric MEMS. There is an opportunity to revolutionize electronics and intelligent microsystems by providing a widely applicable piezoelectric MEMS process to the US R&D community, focusing on providing a secure option for Department of Defense demand. This project will develop CMOS integrated piezoelectric MEMS for academic, commercial, and DOD customers. The MPW will be supported by a PDK (Process Design Kit) that allows users to design piezoelectric Micro/Nano systems, including MEMS and CMOS circuitry, to control the devices. The PDK will be developed via fabrication runs using force kinds of base substrates and enable device topologies to enable a vast majority of piezoelectric devices. Released and solidly mounted piezoelectric devices will be enabled, allowing for the development of resonators, filters, piezoelectric micromachined transducers, gigahertz transducers all in one process flow. This project will also develop CMOS circuits that can be used to drive and sense the piezoelectric transducer for rapid integration of monolithic piezoelectric devices with CMOS. This level integration of multiple MEMS devices in CMOS has not been possible before and will enable orders of magnitude reduction in size, weight, and power of DOD microsystems. The integration level will open the possibility of the circuits community to utilize the PDK and push the frontiers of More-than-Moore and edge-sense-compute paradigms.