Microelectronic Engineering 87 (2010) 708711

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Microelectronic Engineering
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/mee

Self-aligned cantilever positioning for on-substrate measurements using DVD pickup head
F.G. Bosco a,*, E.-T. Hwu b, S. Keller a, A. Greve a, A. Boisen a
a b

Department of Micro- and Nanotechnology, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby 2800, Denmark Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica, Nankang, Taipei 11529, Taiwan

a r t i c l e

i n f o

a b s t r a c t
In this paper, we present a novel approach for measuring the resonant frequency of cantilevers fabricated in polymeric materials. We re-designed the use of a commercial DVD-ROM pickup head and combine it with a glasspolymer substrate in order to obtain a light and portable device to measure the resonant frequency of polymer cantilevers. The use of the Pyrex-SU-8 clamping substrate allows an easy replacement of the cantilever chips and a fast alignment process to the DVD-ROM laser beam. We show measurements of thermal noise for SU-8 and TOPAS cantilevers in air and liquid environment. 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Article history: Received 14 September 2009 Received in revised form 11 December 2009 Accepted 15 December 2009 Available online 23 December 2009 Keywords: Cantilever-based sensing Microfabrication SU-8 DVD pickup head Chip holder

1. Introduction Cantilever-based sensors are promising miniaturized sensing tools for bio-chemical applications [1]. The mechanical response can be acquired through an optical setup, where a laser beam is focused and collimated on the cantilever tip, and the reected light is collected by a photodetector. These types of sensors can be used for bio-chemical detection when the cantilever is functionalized with a sensing layer that interacts with the target biomolecules. The sensitivity of the device is thus related both to the elasto-mechanical properties of the cantilever and to the opto-electronic characteristic of the readout setup. At present the optical equipment used to sense the change in the resonant frequency due to the selective binding of biomolecules to the cantilever surface is typically big and bulky because precise and delicate laser alignment is required. In traditional approaches a single chip is mounted on a holder, precisely aligned to the laser beam, and the cantilevers resonant frequency is measured through the oscillating position of the laser spot onto the photodetector. Typical alignment processes can take several minutes of experienced human work. In this paper we present a novel approach to measure the change of resonant frequency of cantilevers by using a light, compact and high throughput optical device, described in Section 2. The distinctive feature is the auto-align-

ment of the laser beam to the cantilever tip, facilitating faster and more precise measurements. The optical readout of cantilever-based sensors has been re-designed and optimized combining the technology of commercial DVD-ROM readers [2] with a holding substrate. The holding substrate consist of a Pyrex support with an SU-8 structure on the top. 2. Setup In our system cantilever chips are clamped on a predened SU8 structured holder while the DVD-ROM reader is placed 1 mm below the Pyrex substrate. Up to 100 chips can be clamped on the substrate. Once the substrate is mounted onto a XY-stage, simply placing the DVD pickup head 1 mm below the Pyrex surface will automatically align 800 cantilevers to the optical system, being each cantilever tip placed at the same Z distance from the optical head. This distinctive feature saves several hours of alignment work when sequential measurements over several chips need to be performed, compared to existing optical setup. As a consequence, the holding substrate plays an important role in the setup. Chips need to be perfectly clamped to the substrate in order to keep precisely the position of the cantilevers in the XYZ space; furthermore the cantilevers need to be oriented parallel to the Pyrex surface. Fig. 1 shows schematically the layout of the experimental setup. Light (650 nm) emitted by a photodiode passes through a beam splitter and is collimated and focused by an optical system com-

* Corresponding author. E-mail address: lippo.bosco@nanotech.dtu.dk (F.G. Bosco). 0167-9317/$ - see front matter 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.mee.2009.12.064

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resulting holder-chip structures were analyzed with optical microscope and SEM. We have observed that the substrate holding properties are highly increased moving from the traditional holder structure, where the body chip is encapsulated into a square footprint (edgeedge clamping), to congurations where the chip corners are clamped by the footprint walls (corneredge clamping) or where the chip sides are clamped by concave footprint structures (edgecorner clamping) (Fig. 2). These geometries allow better xation of the SU-8 chips that show intrinsic uctuations of the body chip dimensions due to the photolithographic process (up to 40 lm). SU-8 corners are soft enough to be slightly deformed to adapt chips fabricated with different resolutions to precisely t in the same footprint. Fig. 3 shows a SEM picture of the cantilever array oriented parallel to the Pyrex aperture.

Fig. 1. Laser path scheme: the laser beam passes through the Pyrex window before being focused on the cantilever. A perfectly focused beam has a spot size of 0.75 lm. The inset shows the asymmetric light intensity on the 4-quadarant photodetector due to the astigmatic aberration induced by the cylindrical lens. The focus error signal is given by the intensity differences of the single photosensitive fragments composing the whole detector.

posed of two lenses. The laser thus passes through the 500 lm Pyrex substrate (n = 1.47) and is focused on the cantilever tip with a 0.75 lm spot diameter. Complete gold coating or gold pads on the bottom surface of the cantilever allow the laser beam to be reected back to the detection system, composed by a 4-quadrant photodetector. Using astigmatism-based readout, the signal is obtained when some asymmetry is present in the optical beam spot focused on the photodetector. The principle of the astigmatic method is based upon an optical aberration, called astigmatism, occurring when an optical system is not symmetric about the optical axis, e.g., cylindrical lenses [3]. In this case, any small deection of the cantilever is converted to a small focus error onto the photodetector. The measurement signal from the preamplier is recorded by a PC through a data acquisition card (DAQ) which has a bandwidth of 20 MHz and a resolution of 14-bit [4]. 3. Substrate fabrication One of the main challenges is the microfabrication of efcient clamping structures that allow precise chip xation and cantilever alignment over a Pyrex aperture for the bottom-up laser reading. Therefore, several footprint shapes were fabricated in order to optimize the holding properties for different cantilever chip: clamping of SU-8 [5], silicon and TOPAS [6] cantilever-based chips was proven. The cantilever suspending conguration is obtained by spincoating and structuring two layers of SU-8 on a transparent Pyrex wafer (see Fig. 1). The SU-8 layers have thicknesses of 50 and 300 lm, respectively. We evaluate empirically the best holding conguration of a footprint based on the ability of the clamping structure to: allow easy installation and replacement of the chip into the holding structure; clamp the body chip without deforming signicantly the chip structure itself; keep the cantilever array oriented parallel to the Pyrex window. Several experiments were performed and the

Fig. 2. SEM picture of the footprint conguration for SU-8 chips with best holding properties. It integrates both edgecorner (round markers) and corneredge (square markers) clamping points. The body chip is 2.5 4.2 mm.

Fig. 3. SEM picture of the cantilever array oriented parallel to the Pyrex window, for the footprint conguration shown in Fig. 2. The SU-8 cantilevers are 500 lm long, 100 lm wide and 5 lm thick.

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Fig. 4. Resonant frequency peak at 6.671 kHz measured for a gold coated SU-8 cantilever.

Table 1 Geometrical parameters, resonant frequency and Q factor for SU-8 and TOPAS cantilevers measured both in air and liquid. l (lm) SU-8 (Au coated) TOPAS (Au pads) 500 500 W (lm) 100 100 t (lm) 5.5 4.5 f air (kHz) 6.641 4.774 f buffer (kHz) 6.178 4.810 Q factor (air) $16 $10 Q factor (buffer) $6 $4

4. Measurements When a cantilever sensor operates in dynamic mode, the resonance frequency, f0, of the cantilever is monitored and as mass adsorb onto the structure, the resonance frequency decreases. This change in resonance frequency, Df, for a homogeneously distributed adsorbed mass on the cantilever surface is given by:

gle drop in the SU-8 dened pool. Table 1 presents average values of resonant frequency and Q factor for SU-8 and TOPAS cantilevers measured in air and liquid environment. The values of the Q factor measured in air are similar to the values found in literature for polymer cantilevers. As expected we have observed a decrease of the value of Q for experiments conducted in liquid solution [7].

Df f0

Dm 2m0

5. Conclusions The integration of the DVD reader with the on-substrate holding approach leads to a high throughput exible platform with easy self-alignment and replacement of the cantilever chips. With this new on-substrate approach tens of chips can be placed on the Pyrex-SU-8 wafer and be read sequentially. Resonant frequency measurements in buffer solution and air were performed for SU8 and TOPAS cantilevers, giving promising future opportunities for high resolution sensing in air and liquid environment.

where Dm is the mass of the adsorbents and m0 is the initial mass of the cantilever [5]. Thus the resonant frequency f0 is a determinant parameter to link given shift of frequency, Df, to a corresponding mass change, Dm. Here we show resonant frequency measurements performed on different SU-8 and TOPAS cantilevers acquired with the re-designed optical setup illustrated in Fig. 1. In Fig. 4 resonant frequency measurement of Au coated SU-8 cantilevers having length of 500 lm, width of 100 lm and thickness of 5.5 lm is shown. The measurement is acquired in air. Similar measurements have been done for TOPAS cantilevers, and in both cases the intensity of the reected light is sufcient for the resonant peaks to be detected. Most measurements of bio/chemical reactions are performed in liquid. Therefore the measurements have been repeated in a buffer solution. These measurements were conducted by applying a sin-

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