Research Achievements of METU-MEMS Center Along With Its Start-Up Activities

METU-MEMS Center is the first MEMS program in Turkey, started its activities in 1995. The Center has a 1300 m2 cleanroom area with the state-of-the-art MEMS fabrication tools with 4", 6", and 8" wafer processing capability, including 0.35um ASML stepper, STS DRIE, RIE, ICP RIE, PECVD, EVG aligner/bonders, and CMP tools, thanks to the $65M research funds mostly raised in the past 10 years. The Center has been working on development of various sensors and actuators, including very low-cost CMOS based infrared detectors, gyroscopes, accelerometers, RF MEMS devices, energy harvesters, and various patented BioMEMS devices. The talk will introduce METU-MEMS Center, along with its research activities, summarizing the research achievements of each subject (i.e., gyroscopes showing performances below 1degree/hour, accelerometers showing performances below 10ug with about 130dB dynamic range, RF MEMS switches operating about 3.2 billion cycles). The talk will also introduce two current spin-off/start-up companies from METU, namely Mikrosens and Mikro-Tasarim. Mikrosens is a fabless semiconductor company, developing ultra low-cost infrared detectors with one-mask post-CMOS process, where the first product is a wafer level vacuum packaged 160×120 FPA. Mikro-Tasarim is also a fabless semiconductor company, developing ROICs for hybrid/monolithic, cooled/uncooled detectors in UV, Visible, NIR, SWIR, MWIR, and LWIR wavelengths. To highlight its capabilities, its recent CTIA ROIC for VGA (640×512) SWIR arrays will be introduced; in short, this ROIC shows a read noise performance of 5-e, which is about an order of magnitude smaller than the state-of theart counter parts in the world market, in addition to its additional advanced features like the snap-shot operation.
Prof. Dr. Tayfun Akin received the BS degree in electrical with high honors from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, in 1987 and went to the USA in 1987 for his graduate studies with a graduate fellowship provided by NATO Science Scholarship Program through the Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK). He received the M.S. degree in 1989 and the PhD degree in 1994 in electrical engineering, both from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He returned to Turkey to start the country's first MEMS program. He became an Assistant Professor in 1995, an Associate Professor in 1998, and Professor in 2004 in the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. He established and is currently acting as the Director of the METU-MEMS Center which has a 1300 m2 clean room area for 4", 6", and 8" MEMS processing. He raised and managed over 65M USD funding for several national and international projects, including FP6, FP7, NATO SfS, and USA NSF-International projects. He is the winner of the First Prize in Experienced Analog/Digital Mixed-Signal Design Category at 1994 Student VLSI Circuit Design Contest organized by Mentor Graphics, Texas Instruments, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Electronic Design Magazine. He has served in various MEMS, EUROSENSORS, and TRANSDUCERS conferences as a committee member. He was the co chair of the 19th IEEE International Conference of Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS 2006) held in Istanbul, and he was the co-chair of the Steering Committee of the IEEE MEMS Conference in 2007. He has a total of over 180 international journal and conference publications. He is co-founder and CEO of two spin-off/start-up companies, namely Mikrosens which is developing ultra lowcost infrared detectors and Mikro-Tasarim which is developing high performance and state-of-the-art ROIC circuits for imagers in UV, Visible, NIR, SWIR, MWIR, and LWIR wavelengths.