The most recent advances in silicon micromachining technology have given rise to a variety of low-cost pressure sensor applications and solutions. Certain applications had previously been hindered by the high-cost, large size, and overall reliability limitations of electromechanical pressure sensing devices. Furthermore, the integration of on-chip temperature compensation and calibration has al...

The most widely used architecture in large-area amorphous silicon (a-Si) flat panel imagers is a passive pixel sensor (PPS), which consists of a detector and a readout switch. While the PPS has the advantage of being compact and amenable toward high-resolution imaging, reading small PPS output signals requires external column charge amplifiers that produce additional noise and reduce the minimu...

A miniature methane sensor composed of a long ultra-low loss waveguide and a micro-ring resonator filter is proposed with high sensitivity and good selectivity. This sensor takes advantage of the evanescent field to implement methane concentration detection at a near infrared band (1650 nm). In the sensor, two waveguides, a strip waveguide and a slot waveguide, are specially designed and discus...

The solid-state sensor field is maturing and an increasing number of applications is being served. Nevertheless, the available infrastructure and technology have found only few applications within the field of instrumentation and measurement (I&M). Therefore, the aim of this paper is threefold: 1) to categorize the various sensor processing strategies that are available; 2) to provide a represe...

A pressure sensor with a 200 μm diaphragm using silicon nanowires (SiNWs) as a piezoresistive sensing element is developed and optimized. The SiNWs are embedded in a multilayered diaphragm structure comprising silicon nitride (SiNx) and silicon oxide (SiO2). Optimizations were performed on both SiNWs and the diaphragm structure. The diaphragm with a 1.2 μm SiNx layer is considered to be an opti...

A three-axial silicon based force sensor with a volume less than 7 mm3, developed for biomechanical measurements, has been characterized. Results obtained with two different experimental test benches are reported in this paper. High linearity and low hysteresis during sensor normal l e a m ©

Porous silicon nanoneedles can map Cathepsin B activity across normal and tumor human esophageal mucosa. Assembling a peptide-based Cathepsin B cleavable sensor over a large array of nano-needles allows the discrimination of cancer cells from healthy ones in mixed culture. The same sensor applied to tissue can map Cathepsin B activity with high resolution across the tumor margin area of esophag...

Multifunctional black-silicon (b-Si) integrated on the surface of an implantable intraocular pressure sensor significantly improves sensor performance and reliability in six-month in vivo studies. The antireflective properties of b-Si triples the signal-to-noise ratio and increases the optical readout distance to a clinically viable 12 cm. Tissue growth and inflammation response on the sensor i...