An experimental study on fabricating an inverted mesa-type quartz crystal resonator using a cheap wet etching process.

In this study, a miniaturized high fundamental frequency quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) is fabricated for sensor applications using a wet etching technique. The vibration area is reduced in the fabrication of the high frequency QCM with an inverted mesa structure. To reduce the complexity of the side wall profile that results from anisotropic quartz etching, a rectangular vibration area is used instead of the conventional circular structure. QCMs with high Q values exceeding 25,000 at 47 MHz, 27,000 at 60 MHz, 24,000 at 73 MHz and 25,000 at 84 MHz are fabricated on 4 × 4 mm2 chips with small vibration areas of 1.2 × 1.4 mm2. A PMMA-based flow cell is designed and manufactured to characterize the behavior of the fabricated QCM chip in a liquid. Q values as high as 1,006 at 47 MHz, 904 at 62 MHz, 867 at 71 MHz and 747 at 84 MHz are obtained when one side of the chip is exposed to pure water. These results show that fabricated QCM chips can be used for bio- and chemical sensor applications in liquids.