Annealing effect on the performance of sputtering deposited Metglas thin films

Magnetostrictive sensors based on ferromagnetic materials have been widely used in detecting chemicals and biological species. The Metglas™ 2826MB is one of the bulk strip materials that is employed as the sensor platform. However, the sensitivity is limited by the large size of the sensors itself. In order to improve the sensitivity, we have developed a process to fabricate microscale sensors of 500 × 100 μm in size using conventional MEMS technology. As-deposited, the sensors suffered from internal stress, which was released by a annealing the sensors at 215 °C for two hours under vacuum condition. The annealing process improved the magnetic properties of the thin films and increased the resonant frequency of the sensor by 214 kHz.