This study presents the fabrication and characterization of a piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducer (pMUT; radius: 40 µm) using a patterned aluminum nitride (AlN) thin film as the active piezoelectric material. A 20 × 20 array of pMUTs using a 1 µm thick AlN thin film was designed and fabricated on a 2 × 2 mm2 footprint for a high fill factor. Based on the electrical impedance and phase of the pMUT array, the electromechanical coefficient was ~1.7% at the average resonant frequency of 2.82 MHz in air. Dynamic displacement of the pMUT surface was characterized by scanning laser Doppler vibrometry. The pressure output while immersed in water was 19.79 kPa when calculated based on the peak displacement at the resonant frequency. The proposed AlN pMUT array has potential applications in biomedical sensing for healthcare, medical imaging, and biometrics.

In this paper, we propose a high accuracy open-type current sensor with a differential Planar Hall Resistive (PHR) sensor. Conventional open-type current sensors with magnetic sensors are usually vulnerable to interference from an external magnetic field. To reduce the effect of an unintended magnetic field, the proposed design uses a differential structure with PHR. The differential structure provides robust performance to unwanted magnetic flux and increased magnetic sensitivity. In addition, instead of conventional Hall sensors with a magnetic concentrator, a newly developed PHR with high sensitivity is employed to sense horizontal magnetic fields. The PHR sensor and read-out integrated circuit (IC) are integrated through a post-Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process using multi-chip packaging. The current sensor is designed to measure a 1 A current level. The measured performance of the designed current sensor has a 16 kHz bandwidth and a current nonlinearity of under ±0.5%.

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