Simple optical characterisation for biomimetic micromachined silicon strain-sensing structure

This paper presents an on-going work to develop micromachined silicon-based strain sensor inspired from the campaniform sensillum of insects. We present simple optical setup for the characterisation of a membrane-in-recess structure as an early stage in mimicking the natural sensor. The microstructure is a 500 nm-thick SiO2/SiN circular membrane...

Learning from nature: Biologically-inspired sensors

New emerging sensing applications demand novel sensors in micro-/nano-scale to enable integration and embedding into higher level structures or systems. Downsizing the structure will usually decrease the sensitivity of the sensors, since the sensitivity is a function of geometrical parameters, e.g. mass in the case of inertial sensing, and...