Active Temperature Compensation for Encapsulated Silicon Resonators

Faculty: Bruce Wooley

Student: James Salvia

Research Summary

For decades, quarts resonators have been used to generate accurate timing references in billions of devices including computers, cell phones, and even wrist watches. Today, silicon resonators show the potential to replace quartz because of their small size, scalability, lower cost, and potential for CMOS integration. However, several issues remain to be addressed before silicon resonators can be used in high-end applications, such as their sensitivity to temperature variations.

This research aims to improve the temperature stability of the encapsulated silicon resonators developed by the Micro Structures and Sensors Lab at Stanford University http://micromachine.stanford.edu/smssl/. Using a phase locked loop to achieve thermal stability, we hope to reduce the sensitivity of the resonators to less than .1 ppm/K while minimizing power consumption.

Education

• Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, In Progress
• M.S., Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, In Progress
• B.S., Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, 2005

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