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IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 12, NO. 8, AUGUST 2012

Deflection Sensitivity Calibration of Heated

Microcantilevers Using Pseudo-Gratings
Jungchul Lee , Bong Jae Lee, and William P. King

Abstract We report a technique to calibrate the sensitivity

of sensor-integrated atomic force microscope cantilevers using
pseudo-gratings. An offset signal superposed onto the cantilever
control signal modulates the cantilever position over a flat
surface, driving the cantilever toward and away from the
surface in a controlled way. The relationship between the
cantilever sensor signal and displacement provides the cantilever
calibration. We show how this technique can be used to calibrate
heated microcantilever sensors.
Index Terms Atomic force microscopy, calibration, deflection
sensitivity, heated microcantilever.

I. I NTRODUCTION

HE ATOMIC force microscope (AFM) is the most

widely used instrument for measuring nanometer-scale
phenomena [1]. The most common AFM apparatus uses
a laser and a position sensitive photodetector (PSPD) to
detect cantilever deflections. Other approaches for measuring
cantilever deflection include piezoresistive [2], [3] or thermal
sensing [3], [4]. Regardless of the transduction mechanism,
it is necessary to calibrate the deflection sensitivity of a
microcantilever before it is used for a measurement. The key
advantage of cantilevers with integrated deflection sensors
is that they can operate without a laser-based deflection
measurement. This advantage is diminished when the laser
must be used for calibration. Thus there is a need for
non-optical calibration techniques.
This letter introduces a technique to calibrate deflection
sensitivity of heated microcantilevers using deflections that are
controlled through the feedback loop of the AFM system.
II. E XPERIMENT

Fig. 1(a) shows the experimental setup. The setup

includes an AFM system, a Wheatstone bridge, a differential
amplifier, and a low pass filter. The microcantilever has an
Manuscript received February 2, 2012; accepted May 14, 2012. Date of
publication May 24, 2012; date of current version June 13, 2012. This
work was supported in part by the National Research Foundation Grant
funded by the Korean Government NRF-2011-220-D00014 and the Sogang
University Research Grant of 2010 (201010087.01). The associate editor
coordinating the review of this paper and approving it for publication was
Prof. Bernhard Jakoby. Asterisk indicates corresponding author.
J. Lee is with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Sogang
University, Seoul 121-742, South Korea (e-mail: jayclee@sogang.ac.kr).
B. J. Lee is with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Korea
Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon 305-701, South Korea
(e-mail: bongjae.lee@kaist.ac.kr).
W. P. King is with the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801 USA (e-mail:
wpk@illinois.edu).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSEN.2012.2200971

Fig. 1. (a) Schematic for the deflection sensitivity calibration of functional

microcantilevers using the pseudo-grating concept. (b) Experimental setup.
Amplified and filtered signals are fed into a commercial AFM control and
recorded in PC.

integrated resistive heater-thermometer [5]. All resistors in the

circuit including the heated microcantilever are about 2 k.
The Wheatstone bridge output is nulled out upon initial contact
of the heated microcantilever to a flat substrate. An offset
signal determines the initial contact position and contact force.
Once the XY scan starts, a voltage drive signal is superposed
into the control loop, moving the Z scanner up and down.
In this way, the cantilever deflection is modulated as it would
be if moving over a grating, hence the name pseudo-grating.
The cantilever thermal signal varies with the deflection [3][6].
We set the gain of 10 in the differential amplifier stage and
gain of additional 3.16 in the low pass filter stage (Fig. 1(b)).
The thermal signal from the heated microcantilever is
amplified and recorded.
Fig. 2 shows a block diagram of the pseudo-grating technique, a function generator drive signal and the corresponding
pseudo-gratings. The feedback integral gain (K I ) is much
greater than the proportional gain (K P ) and thus the shape of
the pseudo-gratings is the integral of drive signal. In our experiments, a square drive signal produces a triangular pseudograting, where K I varies between 80 and 200, and K P = 0. As
K I decreases, the amplitude of the pseudo-grating decreases.
For example, the peak to peak amplitude becomes 0.50 m
with K I = 80 and K P = 0. The scan size is 5 m and the scan

1530437X/$31.00 2012 IEEE

LEE et al.: DEFLECTION SENSITIVITY CALIBRATION OF HEATED MICROCANTILEVERS USING PSEUDO-GRATINGS

Fig. 2. (a) Block diagram for the pseudo-grating technique. (b) Function
generator drive signals and corresponding pseudo-gratings. (c) Triangular pseudo-gratings generated using square wave drives from the function
generator have a peak to peak amplitude of 2.28 m and a pitch of 1.12 m.

(a)

(b)

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higher in-plane temperature gradient in the silicon substrate

compared to the glass substrate. Fig. 3(b) shows the peak
to peak deflection sensitivity as a function of the grating amplitude varying from 0.5 to 2.0 m. As the amplitude increases, the deflection sensitivity for glass substrate
decreases, while that for silicon substrate increases, which
is expected from the substrate-dependent thermal signals of
Fig. 3(a).
The substrate-dependent deflection sensitivity of the heated
cantilever can be attributed to the difference in substrate
thermal conductivities. During deflection, the thermal signal
changes as the average air gap between the cantilever and
the substrate changes [3][6]. While the thermal conductivity
of the glass is about 100X less than that of the silicon, the
measured deflection sensitivity on the glass substrate is only
about 40 % lower than that on the silicon substrate. This result
is expected from previous publications [3], [4]. The cantilever
thermal conductance depends upon the distance between the
cantilever and the substrate, the thermal conductivity of the
surrounding medium (air), and the thermal conductivity of the
substrate. The heat flux to the silicon substrate is expected
to be about 5X larger than that to the glass substrate. The
heated region in the silicon substrate is about 10X larger than
that in the glass. Taken together, we expect the sensitivity to
be approximately 2X larger in the for the silicon substrate
compared to the glass substrate, which is consistent with the
measured result.
III. C ONCLUSION

Fig. 3. (a) Substrate-dependent thermal signal as a function of vertical

deflection. (b) Sensitivity as a function of the triangular pseudo-grating
amplitude for glass and silicon substrates.

rate is fixed at 0.25 Hz. Because this frequency modulation

is well below the thermal cut-off of the heated cantilever,
thermal signals were relatively insensitive to frequency.
We calibrated the cantilever for 5 different deflection
amplitudes on two different substrates. With K I = 200, the
peak to peak deflection is 2.279 0.015 m when the
bridge bias is 4V DC. The deflection sensitivity of the heated
cantilever is 14.3 mV/m for the glass substrate and
24.4 mV/m for the silicon substrate. With the spring
constant calibration (k = 0.92 N/m), the force sensitivity is
15.5 mV/N for the glass substrate and 26.5 mV/N for the
silicon substrate.
Fig. 3(a) shows substrate-dependent thermal signal as a
function of vertical deflection. The thermal signal on glass
is nearly symmetric while the thermal signal on silicon
is asymmetric and concave. The difference is due to the

We have demonstrated a calibration technique for the

deflection sensitivity of heated microcantilevers by introducing
artificial periodic patterns on flat substrates. With the pseudograting amplitude of 2.28 m, the deflection sensitivity of the
heated cantilever was 14.3 mV/m for the glass substrate and
24.4 mV/m for the silicon substrate. The technique could
be further applied to any functional microcantilever, such as
pieozoresistive or piezoelectric cantilevers.
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