CMOS MEMS Thermal Flow Sensor With Enhanced Sensitivity for Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning Application

Xu, Wei; Wang, Xiaoyi; Wang, Ruijie; Izhar,; Xu, Jiujun; Lee, Yi-Kuen

doi:10.1109/tie.2020.2984446

Cited by 37 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…In the earlier stage, the CMOS MEMS process had a larger CD or minimum line width in the academic labs of Europe and USA [73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80]. As the CD kept on decreasing to 0.8 µm [35] or even smaller than 0.6 µm [90,113] Fabrication technologies during CMOS and CMOS MEMS processes include thermal conversion [94,[141][142][143][144][145], chemical vapor deposition (CVD) [4,80,134], epitaxy [32,[146][147][148][149][150], physical vapor deposition (PVD) [151][152][153][154][155], atomic layer deposition (ALD) [156,157], spin-on films/dielectrics [158][159][160], bulk micromachining [161], surface micromachining [51,113,135,162], photolithography module [163], dry etching, and wet etching. Most of the materials used for structural, sacrificial and passivation layers include silicon and its oxide, nitride, silicon-germanium, carbide derivatives, and other notable semiconductor and dielectric materials [133,…”

Section: Educational Cmos Foundry Service Provided By Tsrimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The amplifier was also added later to the sensor design. Numerous micromachined thermal flow sensors have been surveyed for different materials and applications including battery-free, wireless devices, nano mechanical sensor [171], infrared sensors [172][173][174][175][176], and calorimetric sensors [144,[177][178][179][180]. The high-quality CMOS foundry services provided by TSMC and UMC foundry were highly welcome over the past two decades.…”

Section: Cmos Mems Sensor Design Flowmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Foundry Service of CMOS MEMS Processes and the Case Study of the Flow Sensor

et al. 2022

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The complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process is the main stream to fabricate integrated circuits (ICs) in the semiconductor industry. Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), when combined with CMOS electronics to form the CMOS MEMS process, have the merits of small features, low power consumption, on-chip circuitry, and high sensitivity to develop microsensors and micro actuators. Firstly, the authors review the educational CMOS MEMS foundry service provided by the Taiwan Semiconductor Research Institute (TSRI) allied with the United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Taiwan’s foundry service of ICs is leading in the world. Secondly, the authors show the new flow sensor integrated with an instrumentation amplifier (IA) fabricated by the latest UMC 0.18 µm CMOS MEMS process as the case study. The new flow sensor adopted the self-heating resistive-thermal-detector (RTD) to sense the flow speed. This self-heating RTD half-bridge alone gives a normalized output sensitivity of 138 µV/V/(m/s)/mW only. After being integrated with an on-chip amplifier gain of 20 dB, the overall sensitivity of the flow sensor was measured and substantially improved to 1388 µV/V/(m/s)/mW for the flow speed range of 0–5 m/s. Finally, the advantages of the CMOS MEMS flow sensors are justified and discussed by the testing results.

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Section: Educational Cmos Foundry Service Provided By Tsrimentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Cmos Mems Sensor Design Flowmentioning

confidence: 99%

Foundry Service of CMOS MEMS Processes and the Case Study of the Flow Sensor

et al. 2022

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“…Currently, as one of the important detection principles of MEMS sensors, thermal detection has been widely used in fluid sensing fields, especially in gas-related detection, such as gas flow [ 1 , 2 , 3 ], thermal conductivity [ 4 , 5 , 6 ], shear-stress [ 7 , 8 , 9 ], and vacuum [ 10 , 11 , 12 ], etc. Compared to normal chemical sensors, thermal MEMS sensors have the advantages of broad-spectrum, fast response, low power consumption, and long-term stability, becoming a major, long-standing research focus [ 13 , 14 , 15 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thermal Conductivity Gas Sensor with Enhanced Flow-Rate Independence

Wang

Liu

Zhou

et al. 2022

Sensors

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In this article, novel thermal gas sensors with newly designed diffusion gas channels are proposed to reduce the flow-rate disturbance. Simulation studies suggest that by lowering the gas flow velocity near the hot film, the maximum normalized temperature changes caused by flow-rate variations in the two new designs (Type-H and Type-U) are decreased to only 1.22% and 0.02%, which is much smaller than in the traditional straight design (Type-I) of 20.16%. Experiment results are in agreement with the simulations that the maximum normalized flow-rate interferences in Type-H and Type-U are only 1.51% and 1.65%, compared to 24.91% in Type-I. As the introduced CO2 flow varied from 1 to 20 sccm, the normalized output deviations in Type-H and Type-U are 0.38% and 0.02%, respectively, which are 2 and 3 orders of magnitude lower than in Type-I of 10.20%. In addition, the recovery time is almost the same in all these sensors. These results indicate that the principle of decreasing the flow velocity near the hot film caused by the two novel diffusion designs can enhance the flow-rate independence and improve the accuracy of the thermal conductivity as well as the gas detection.

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“…Microfabricated components have been integrated into microfluidic devices and implemented to develop more complex LOC devices for point-of-care testing. This integration enables the size reduction of essential equipment using integrated microfluidic components, such as electrokinetic actuators [3], micropumps [4], [5], electrical circuits [6]- [8], and analytical sensors [7]- [17].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thermal Flow Sensor With a Bidirectional Thermal Reference

Okamoto

Nguyen

Okada

et al. 2022

J. Microelectromech. Syst.

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Conventional thermal flow sensors require samples to be heated; however, the temperature rise of the measuring tools limits their use in biological applications. To address this limitation, in this study, we propose a thermal flow sensor with a bidirectional thermal reference. We fabricated an integrated calorimetric and hot-film thermal flow sensor with a bidirectional thermal reference using a Peltier module to produce a thermal distribution that depends on the flow rate. The integrated thermal flow sensors enable high-resolution and wide-range flow rate measurements in a microfluidic device without the use of heating reagents in the cooling measurement mode. In addition, the sensor can be used as a typical heating thermal flow sensor by inverting the current applied to the Peltier module. Computational fluid dynamics simulations and experiments were performed to evaluate the performance of the integrated sensors in heating and cooling modes. In both modes, the calorimetric sensor measured low flow rates with a resolution of 100 nL/min, whereas the hot-film sensor measured a wide range of flow rates up to 200 µL/min. The proposed sensor expands the use of the thermal flow sensors by switching between the cooling and heating modes according to the sample temperature and maximum temperature limit.[2022-0090]

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CMOS MEMS Thermal Flow Sensor With Enhanced Sensitivity for Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning Application

Cited by 37 publications

References 36 publications

Foundry Service of CMOS MEMS Processes and the Case Study of the Flow Sensor

Foundry Service of CMOS MEMS Processes and the Case Study of the Flow Sensor

Thermal Conductivity Gas Sensor with Enhanced Flow-Rate Independence

Thermal Flow Sensor With a Bidirectional Thermal Reference

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