MEMS on Glass: Technology with applications for fingerprint sensors

Keith DeConde
Chief Technical Officer, Fidelica Microsystems

Fidelica Microsystems develops MEMS products in which low-cost at high volume is the primary competitive advantage. over products already in the marketplace. The emphasis on cost has led Fidelica to develop its first product, a low-power, compact, fingerprint sensor, for production on glass substrates in factories that produce flat panel displays (FPDs). An ASIC is flip-chip bonded to the substrate, so that the substrate need not contain any active electronic elements.

ADVANTAGES OF MEMS ON GLASS

The Fidelica approach has been to develop new designs that use well-established methods and facilities for high-volume production. By building MEMS devices on glass, Fidelica is able to exploit several advantages over more traditional MEMS on silicon.

• First, because the substrates are much larger, and cost less per unit area to process, further miniaturization of device geometries is not the only path to improved cost-competitiveness. This difference is especially valuable in cases such as the fingerprint sensor, where application, rather than process resolution, determines the device size.

• Second, because the resolution requirements are not extreme, the MEMS devices can be produced in facilities that may not have the latest photolithography tools, further reducing the costs, and providing volume production flows to fabrication facilitiess that might already be seeing falling demand.

• Third, because the substrate need not include active electronics, the choice of materials in the device is broadened, so that the material for a layer might be better suited for the function of that layer.

• Fourth, the optical transparency of the substrate opens the possibility for several future enhancements of the fingerprint sensor, in particular.

About the speaker:

Dr. Keith DeConde is Chief Technical Officer at Fidelica Microsystems. His background includes a broad mix of technical and business expertise in rapid growth technology-oriented businesses. he comes to Fidelica Microsystems from Moog, Inc., where he was the Manager of the Motion Systems Division. There, he was responsible for engineering, operations and program management related to the design and manufacture of high performance motion control systems. Prior to Moog, Dr. DeConde was President and Chief Operating Officer at Schaeffer Magnetics, Inc., and before that, he was Manager of Manufacturing Engineering within the thin-film head division of Applied Magnetics. He was Senior Staff Engineer at Perkin Elmer Corporation, and at Princeton University he was a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Physics.

Keith DeConde will speak instead of K. Ganapathi, who was originally scheduled.

Contact information:

Keith DeConde
Fidelica Microsystems>BR> 423 Dixon Landing Road
Milpitas, CA 95035
kdeconde@fidelica.com