Parylene for MEMS Applications

Professor Yu-Chong Tai
The Caltech MEMS Lab
Professor of Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering
California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, CA 91125
[email protected]

Parylene is an emerging polymer MEMS material. In my talk, I’ll discuss our work on Parylene MEMS at the Caltech MEMS lab. Topics include the Parylene material, technology and various applications. Parylene has the unique feature of room-temperature and pinhole-free conformal CVD deposition. It is a post-CMOS compatible material. It is chemically inert and, interestingly, Parylene thin film usually possesses a tensile intrinsic stress that can be controlled by the thermal processing steps. These features all together allow integrated parylene MEMS structures in many designs. As a whole, I will present our work on Parylene MEMS for various applications. First, I will discuss flow sensors, accelerometers, seismometers and bolometers. Then, I will emphasize our efforts of using Parylene for biomedical devices because it is known to be a superb biocompatible material. Our goal is to make integrated systems with complex functions. To this end, I’ll report to you our recent results on Parylene retinal implants, neurocages, microfluidics and Parylene LC-on-a-chip.

Yu-Chong Tai is a Professor of Electrical and Bioengineering Engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). His main research interest has been MEMS since his graduate school in 1983. He graduated from UC Berkeley working on polysilicon micromechanisms and micromotors, and he joined Caltech in 1989 after PhD. At Caltech, he built the Caltech MEMS Lab, which is a 100% MEMS facility with 7,000 square feet of laboratory (including 3,000 square feet of class-100 clean room). He leads a group of more than 20 researchers working on various MEMS projects such as integrated microfluidics, bio MEMS, smart skins, lab-on-a-chip and micro power generator. He has more than 200 technical articles in the field of MEMS. He is the recipient of the IBM Fellows, Ross Tucker Award, Best Thesis Award, Presidential Young Investigator (PYI) Award and Packard Award. He was involved in many MEMS Conferences and, for example, he was the General co-Chairman of the 2002 IEEE MEMS Conference. He is a Section Editor of the Sensors and Actuator and a Subject Editor of the IEEE/ASME J. of MEMS.