Macroporous silicon has been etched from n-type Si, using a vertical etching cell where no rear side contact on the silicon wafer is necessary. The resulting macropores have been characterised by means of Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). After etching, SiO2 was thermally grown on the top of the porous silicon as an insulating layer and Si3N4 was deposited by means of Low Pressure Chemical Va...

In this paper two MEMS capacitive pressure sensor of two diffident geometries are designed for measurement of absolute pressure. Both of these sensors are designed as parallel plates where one is movable and the other is fixed. The only difference with common parallel plate structure is that one of the movable plates is supported by four anchors with respect to the fixed plate. Here we have con...

We report fabrication of a microneedle-based three-electrode integrated electrochemical sensor and in-vitro characterization of this sensor for glucose sensing applications. A piece of silicon was sequentially dry and wet etched to form a 15 × 15 array of tall (approximately 380 µm) sharp silicon microneedles. Iron catalyst was deposited through a SU-8 shadow mask to form the working electrode ...

In this paper, we propose a silicon-retina-based stereo vision system, used for pre-crash warning or rather side-impact detection applications in vehicles. The bio-inspired silicon retina sensor is a new kind of sensor, which delivers data asynchronously and only if the intensity of the ambient light changes. Therefore, the amount of data that must be processed decreases significantly compared ...

We present a short review of recent progress in the field of optical gas sensors based on porous silicon (PSi) and PSi composites, which are separate from PSi optochemical and biological sensors for a liquid medium. Different periodical and nonperiodical PSi photonic structures (bares, modified by functional groups or infiltrated with sensory polymers) are described for gas sensing with an emph...

This application note shows how to select a temperature sensor and conditioning circuit to maximize the measurement accuracy and simplify the interface to the microcontroller. Practical circuits and interface techniques will be provided for embedded applications with thermocouples, Resistive Temperature Detectors (RTDs), thermistors and silicon integrated circuit temperature sensors. The attrib...

Under the proper orientations and excitations, the transverse output of rotationally symmetric four-contact van der Pauw (VDP) stress sensors depends upon only the in-plane shear stress or the difference of the in-plane normal stresses on (100) silicon. In bridgemode, each sensor requires only one four-wire measurement and produces an output voltage with a sensitivity that is 3.16 times that of...

This paper presents a 64×64 pixel micro-bolometer based temporal contrast IR sensor. The pixels of the sensor independently and asynchronously respond to changes in thermal IR radiation and communicate respective events via arbitrated AER. A 46dB-gain, small-area, ultra low-power, low-mismatch differencing switched-capacitor amplifier has been designed for reading out the bolometer front-end. T...

In this paper, we describe an infrared thermopile sensor comprising of single crystal silicon p+ and n+ elements, with an integrated diode temperature sensor fabricated using a commercial SOI-CMOS process followed by Deep Reactive Ion Etching (DRIE). The chip area is 1.16 mm × 1.06 mm. The integrated diode, being on the same substrate, allows a more localized measurement of the cold junction te...

We present in-depth discussion of the design and optimization of a nanomechanical sensor using a silicon cantilever comprising a two-dimensional photonic crystal (PC) nanocavity resonator arranged in a U-shaped silicon PC waveguide. For example, the minimum detectable strain, vertical deflection at the cantilever end, and force load are observed as 0.0133%, 0.37 mum, and 0.0625 muN, respectivel...