PiezoMEMS Analyzer

Thin-piezoelectric-film technology is leaving the laboratory to become commercial PiezoMEMS Analyzer. Much thicker bulk capacitors are being embedded as actuators and sensors inside their own electronic circuitry. Multidisciplinary teams of mechanical, electrical, and reliability engineers now work alongside materials engineers to create new and novel devices.

Classic engineering tools such as impulse response, impedance analysis, and resonance characterization must be integrated with traditional polarization, piezoelectric, pyroelectric, and magnetoelectric measurements. To control circuits containing embedded ferroic capacitors, asynchronous or semi-synchronous digital and analog functions must run independent-of or in-parallel-with crystal-clock-controlled ferroic measurements. Communication with embedded controllers and custom digital circuitry is critical. Together these requirements demand an extremely complex test environment.

Radiant Technologies’ Precision PiezoMEMS Analyzer integrates digital, analog, and communications circuit functions with the existing non-linear materials measurement capabilities of the Precision Multiferroic Non-linear Materials Tester, all supervised by Radiant’s Vision programmable test environment. The PiezoMEMS Analyzer not only measures piezoelectric properties of actuator and sensor elements of a commercial product, it will communicate with the product’s electronic logic, talk to embedded microprocessors, supply asynchronous voltages and pulses, and measure sensor frequencies.