Abstract:A novel resonant pressure sensor with an improved micromechanical double-ended tuning fork resonator packaged in dry air at atmospheric pressure is presented. The resonator is electrostatically driven and capacitively detected, and the sensor is designed to realize a low cost resonant pressure sensor with medium accuracy. Various damping mechanisms in a resonator that is vibrating at atmospheric pressure are analyzed in detail, and a formula is developed to predict the overall quality factor. A trade-off has been reached between the quality factor, stress sensitivity and drive capability of the resonator. Furthermore, differential sense elements and the method of electromechanical amplitude modulation are used for capacitive detection to obtain a large signal-to-noise ratio. The prototype sensor chip is successfully fabricated using a micromachining process based on a commercially available silicon-on-insulator wafer and is hermetically encapsulated in a custom 16-pin Kovar package. Preliminary measurements show that the fundamental frequency of the resonant pressure sensor is approximately 34.55 kHz with a pressure sensitivity of 20.77 Hz/kPa. Over the full scale pressure range of 100-400 kPa and the whole temperature range of −20-60 °C, high quality factors from 1,146 to 1,772 are obtained. The characterization of the prototype sensor reveals the feasibility of a resonant pressure sensor packaged at atmospheric pressure.

This paper presents a micromachined resonant pressure sensor. The sensor is designed to optimize the sensitivity and reduce the cross-talk between the driving electrodes and sensing electrodes. The relationship between the sensitivity of the sensor and the main design parameters is analyzed both theoretically and numerically. The sensing and driving electrodes are optimized to get both high sensing capacitance and low cross-talk. This sensor is fabricated using a micromachining process based on a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer. An open-loop measurement system and a closed-loop self-oscillation system is employed to measure the characteristics of the sensor. The experiment result shows that the sensor has a pressure sensitivity of about 29 Hz/kPa, a nonlinearity of 0.02%FS, a hysteresis error of 0.05%FS, and a repeatability error of 0.01%FS. The temperature coefficient is less than 2 Hz/°C in the range of −40 to 80 °C and the short-term stability of the sensor is better than 0.005%FS.

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Microneedles have broad applications in biomedical and neural measurements, drug-delivery systems, and microbiological sample analysis. Blood compatibility is required when microneedle is used in blood related field. We proposed a method to improve the blood clotting feature of silicon microneedle by silver coating. We fabricated the silicon microneedle with and without silver coating by wet etching and metal sputtering and implemented the clotting test. The clotting test results indicated that silver coating plays more important role to improve the blood compatibility of silicon microneedle than surface structure.