Design & Modeling of a MEMS Contact-mode Piezoresistive Detector for Pull-in Acceleration Sensing

Master thesis (2011)

Authors

Contributors

V. Rajaraman (mentor)
Department
Microelectronics & Computer Engineering (EEMCS) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2011 Hau, B.S.
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Published Date

06-07-2011

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Microelectronics & Computer Engineering

Abstract

Recently a new kind of accelerometer was developed. The accelerometer uses the pull-in time to measure the accelerations. However most of the applied measurement techniques for this kind of accelerometers had shown some drawbacks in the working process. So in this dissertation a new measurement method is introduced based on piezoresistivity to overcome some of the issues. The new measurement method made use of the piezoresistive contact-mode detectors. In this project the detectors were investigated for the realization of pull-in time accelerometers. The working principle of this measurement technique was as follows, when pull-in occurs, the piezoresistive contact-mode detector senses the movement and a signal is created to signify the impact event. The contact method approach is introduced and explained in detail in the thesis along with simulated and experimental data from fabricated microdevices. The sensitivity of the fabricated detector was found to be 0.1mV/nm.