Integrated CMOS-MEMS Flow Sensor With High Sensitivity and Large Flow Range

Ahmed, Moaaz; Xu, Wei; Mohamad, Saqib; Duan, Mingzheng; Lee, Yi-Kuen; Bermak, Amine

doi:10.1109/jsen.2017.2672693

Cited by 20 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Table 2 shows the comparison between our MEMS calorimetric sensor and the other reported CMOS thermal flow sensors. Our MEMS calorimetric sensor gains a prominent normalized sensitivity S of 117 mV/(m/s)/mW with respect to the input heating power, which shows a 21 × higher sensitivity as compared to others work [9,[36][37][38][39][40]. The calorimetric sensor in [41] has a high sensitivity of 103 mV/(m/s)/mW.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 71%

RETRACTED: Constant Temperature Anemometer with Self-Calibration Closed Loop Circuit

2020

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In this paper, a Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) calorimetric sensor with its measurement electronics is designed, fabricated, and tested. The idea is to apply a configurable voltage to the sensitive resistor and measure the current flowing through the heating resistor using a current mirror controlled by an analog feedback loop. In order to cancel the offset and errors of the amplifier, the constant temperature anemometer (CTA) circuit is periodically calibrated. This technique improves the accuracy of the measurement and allows high sensitivity and high bandwidth frequency. The CTA circuit is implemented in a CMOS FD-SOI 28 nm technology. The supply voltage is 1.2 V while the core area is 0.266 mm2. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the MEMS calorimetric sensor for measuring airflow rate. The developed MEMS calorimetric sensor shows a maximum normalized sensitivity of 117 mV/(m/s)/mW with respect to the input heating power and a wide dynamic flow range of 0–26 m/s. The high sensitivity and wide dynamic range achieved by our MEMS flow sensor enable its deployment as a promising sensing node for direct wall shear stress measurement applications.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 71%

RETRACTED: Constant Temperature Anemometer with Self-Calibration Closed Loop Circuit

2020

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“…The sensor size herein was 300 µm × 250 µm in Figure 7a,b, which is smaller than many prior arts'. Within the flow speed range of 0-15 m/s in a wind tunnel, a normalized sensitivity of this small CMOS MEMS sensor was obtained as 138 µV/V/(m/s)/mW, which is with the same order of magnitude to the best value of 160 µV/V/(m/s)/mW of the prior arts [59,60,62,76,93,94,97,185].…”

Section: Smaller Device Sizementioning

confidence: 68%

“…Flow sensors have many emerging applications such as in oxygen respirators [61], leak detection [62], flow rate detection [59,60], gas supply control [58,63], air speed detection of wind tunnel [64], wind turbine [65][66][67][68], biomimetic flapping wing studies [69][70][71][72][73][74][75], etc. A robust and miniaturized instrument and measurement system is required to obtain accurate and reliable flow speed recordings of the above applications.…”

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confidence: 99%

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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“…Micromachines 2020, 11,205 7 of 10 operating principle of this CTD circuit is described in [14]. Our design incorporates the Wheatstone bridge readout method [15], for the type A sensor, the circuit is constituted with upstream and downstream resistors with the addition of two on-chip resistors. For the type B sensor, the Wheatstone bridge circuit is achieved only with upstream and downstream resistors.…”

Section: Device Characterizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Front-Side Microfabricated Thermoresistive Gas Flow Sensor for High-Performance, Low-Cost and High-Yield Volume Production

Xue

Wang

2020

Micromachines

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In this paper, we present a novel thermoresistive gas flow sensor with a high-yield and low-cost volume production by using front-side microfabricated technology. To best improve the thermal resistance, a micro-air-trench between the heater and the thermistors was opened to minimize the heat loss from the heater to the silicon substrate. Two types of gas flow sensors were designed with the optimal thermal-insulation configuration and fabricated by a single-wafer-based single-side process in (111) wafers, where the type A sensor has two thermistors while the type B sensor has four. Chip dimensions of both sensors are as small as 0.7 mm × 0.7 mm and the sensors achieve a short response time of 1.5 ms. Furthermore, without using any amplification, the normalized sensitivity of type A and type B sensors is 1.9 mV/(SLM)/mW and 3.9 mV/(SLM)/mW for nitrogen gas flow and the minimum detectable flow rate is estimated at about 0.53 and 0.26 standard cubic centimeter per minute (sccm), respectively.Micromachines 2020, 11, 205 2 of 10 insulation membrane is formed by potassium hydroxide (KOH) anisotropic etching from the wafer backside. The anisotropic etching-induced inclined sidewalls cause the chip size to be quite large and the back-sided KOH etching is time-consuming, which yield a higher batch-fabrication cost [10]. Thus, developing a new strategy to minimize the chip size for realizing batch-fabrication with a lower cost is an important issue. Recently, a commercial 0.35 µm 2P4M microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) process was used in [11] to fabricate a sensor from the front-side of a (100) wafer. The approach decreased the chip-size and fabrication cost. However, the insulation membrane was released through XeF 2 isotropic etching, Thus, a depth-limited insulation cavity was formed, which would increase the heat loss, lower the thermal resistance and cause a relatively lower sensitivity of the sensor. Here, this paper expands on preliminary research presented in [12] and explores a tiny-sized ultrasensitive thermoresistive gas flow sensor that is single-side processed in an ordinary single-polished (111) silicon wafer. By changing the number of thermoresistive sensors, we developed two types of differential thermoresistive gas flow sensors, a half-bridge type and a full-bridge type.

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Integrated CMOS-MEMS Flow Sensor With High Sensitivity and Large Flow Range

Cited by 20 publications

References 5 publications

RETRACTED: Constant Temperature Anemometer with Self-Calibration Closed Loop Circuit

RETRACTED: Constant Temperature Anemometer with Self-Calibration Closed Loop Circuit

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

A Front-Side Microfabricated Thermoresistive Gas Flow Sensor for High-Performance, Low-Cost and High-Yield Volume Production

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