Research on Micro Accelerometer Array

Abstract

In a physical process, there might be more than one acceleration to be measured, but a micro accelerometer of a certain testing range can hardly satisfy the measurement requirement. In this paper, a micro accelerometer array with four testing ranges, namely, 0∼100g, 0∼500g, 0∼1,000g and 0∼2,000g, is designed and fabricated. In addition to the design and fabrication process, the protection for the array elements on the condition of overload is described in detail. From the static and dynamic measurement results, it is known that the array has linearity smaller than 2.5%, what’s more, it has quite good frequency response characteristics. The experimental results demonstrate that the array can be used for the measurement of a physical process with multi-acceleration.

Design, Fabrication, and Implementation of an Array-Type MEMS Piezoresistive Intelligent Pressure Sensor System

“…The array-type pressure sensor system comprises several pressure sensors with different ranges; therefore, it can achieve high linearity and sensitivity within the hybrid composite range and to meet the accurate radiosonde pressure measurement in the full range from 0 to 100 kPa. At present, there have been studies about pressure sensor array [ 5 , 9 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 ]. For instance, Sugiyama et al [ 18 ] reported a 32 × 32 (1k)-element silicon pressure sensor array consisting of piezoresistive elements and CMOS processing circuit, and the array can provide two-dimensional pressure distribution tests for tactile image detection.…”

“…Specifically, three different types of sensors (different sensitivities and ranges), featuring a diaphragm thickness of 3 μm and diaphragm sizes of 500 μm, 700 μm, and 900 μm, have been fabricated and attached to the printed circuit board (PCB) with a spacing of 6 mm to form the array, which is mounted flush with the measurement surface. Xiong et al [ 21 ] designed a composite-range micro accelerometer array consisting of four piezoresistive micro accelerometers with the range of 100 g, 500 g, 1000 g, and 2000 g, respectively. The composite-range micro accelerometer has a good linearity and the problem that the acceleration may have a relatively large dynamic range in the same physical process is solved, thus it can accurately measure the acceleration values that cover the high and low range.…”

“…In this paper, in order to obtain high-performance array-type piezoresistive pressure sensors based on silicon on insulator (SOI) for radiosonde measurements of pressure, we investigate the design, optimization modeling, fabrication, measurement and temperature drift and nonlinear error compensation of the monolithically integrated MEMS pressure sensor array taking into account the balance between the low voltage noise and the high sensitivity as well as high linearity. Specifically, in contrast to pressure sensor arrays in existing literatures [ 5 , 9 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 ], this paper presents a novel array sensor structure integrated by two sets of four pressure sensors in different ranges onto the same chip to improve the overall performance. The array overcomes the weaknesses about the low sensitivity of large-range sensors to measure the small pressure and the high-pressure non-linear of low-range sensors to measure the high pressure.…”