A high sensitive pressure sensor with the novel bossed diaphragm combined with peninsula-island structure

Thermal-Performance Instability in Piezoresistive Sensors: Inducement and Improvement

“…Flat and bossed diaphragms are the most used schemes for pressure sensors. Flat diaphragms with different geometry (e.g., square, circle and rectangle) and thickness (from several microns to hundreds of microns) can measure pressures from Pa to MPa with favorable sensitivity and dynamic response [27,28]; the bossed diaphragms provide the sensor with better linearity and overload resistance when used in ultra-high sensitive measurement of vacuum levele [29,30]; meanwhile, cross-beams, peninsula-islands and annular grooves are also incorporated into the flat or bossed diaphragms to further optimize the sensor features [31]. Cantilevers are often utilized as a probe in micro-force detection, atomic force microscope measurement, chemical or bio-sensing, and some accelerometers also adopt cantilevers to acquire high-G acceleration signals [15,32].…”

Application and Optimization of Stiffness Abruption Structures for Pressure Sensors with High Sensitivity and Anti-Overload Ability

“…The sensing chip structures presented in [ 25 , 34 , 35 ] had both bending stiffness valleys along the longitudinal direction and bending stiffness peaks along the transversal direction realized by bossed beams, islands and groove structures, as shown in Figure 3 . Compared with the structures presented in [ 21 , 22 , 33 ], the structures presented in [ 25 , 34 , 35 ] showed less elastic potential energy dissipation around the SCR boundary, so the stress concentration distribution of condition I can confined in a region surrounded by the junctions of the low bending stiffness area and high bending stiffness area. Also, based on the principle of energy conservation, a higher stress concentration can be obtained by shrinking the area of the SCR, by which means, the sensitivity of the sensing chip can be improved.…”

“…However, condition II always had a large elastic potential energy dissipation along the transversal direction which limits further improvement of the measuring sensitivity of the sensing chip, so condition I with the lowest bending stiffness along the longitudinal direction and the highest bending stiffness along the transversal direction was the best stiffness distribution for a piezoresistive pressure sensing chip. Based on previously researched peninsula-island structures [ 35 , 37 , 38 ], a peninsula-island structure with different distribution patterns and improved optimization method is presented as follows.…”

“…Here the pressure sensors using different sensing chips with peninsula-island bossed diaphragms as shown in Figure 16 were fabricated to verify the design theory. The detailed fabrication process of the sensing chip was described in the Appendix [ 35 ]. The schematic packaging structure of the pressure sensor is shown in Figure 23 .…”

“… Diaphragm structures had both maximum bending stiffness along the transversal direction and minmum bending stiffness along the longitudinal direction: ( a ) Yu’s structure [ 25 ]; ( b ) Yang’s structure [ 34 ]; ( c ) Xu’s structure [ 35 ]. …”