A microcantilever heater–thermometer with a thermal isolation layer for making thermal nanotopography measurements

This paper presents a microcantilever having a microscale heater–thermometer fabricated from doped single crystal silicon that is mounted on a silicon nitride thermal isolation structure. The silicon nitride isolation structure is in turn connected to doped single crystal silicon legs. The cantilever fabrication, its characterization, and its application in thermal nanotopography measurements are presented in this work. The cantilever can reach temperatures over 600 °C with a heating power of 4 mW. The cantilever has a thermal resistance that exceeds 10⁵ K W⁻¹ when away from a substrate. Making a contact-mode scan over a silicon calibration grating of height 20 nm, the cantilever has a topography reading sensitivity of 1.3 × 10⁻⁴ nm⁻¹, and a topography reading resolution of about 7 pm Hz^−1/2. These performance characteristics compare extremely well to published ones for other kinds of cantilevers.