A micromechanical pressure sensor with reconfigurable ASIC

Software and Hardware of Computer, Network, Telecommunication, Control, and Measurement Systems
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Abstract:

In this paper, a MEMS pressure sensor with reconfigurable ASIC and measurement range of 10 kPa to 100 MPa was designed, based on the system model design approach. The competitive advantages of the method include rapid prototyping and controlling parameters of micromechanical pressure sensor at all design stages; thus, reducing the device development and manufacturing costs. The set of unified piezoresistive sensing elements with different full scale pressure and sensitivity was implemented on a pre-doped silicon on insulator (SOI) wafer. The optimal parameters of sensing elements and integrated circuit were obtained using complex optimization criterion by system level simulation and refined by finite element method. The reconfiguration requirements were obtained by simulation of technological process variations. The reconfigurable ASIC is implemented using 0.18 µm SOI technology. The ASIC provides integrated solution with on-chip programmable offset trimming, temperature sensing, clock generation and digital signal processing. The system level and schematic simulations were performed during ASIC development. The digital signal processing verification was performed by FPGA prototyping. The experimental studies were carried out for sensor prototypes with 100 kPa and 1 MPa full scale range. The developed pressure sensor based on micro-assembly achieves the 0.06% main full-scale error.