The measurement and control of temperatures is one of the most common applications for sensors and is becoming increasingly important due to the requirements of industry 4.0 applications, e.g. in plant and process control. Recently, an important milestone was reached in a development project for high-temperature diodes.
Semiconductor diodes and transistors are small, inexpensive, highly sensitive and almost linear temperature sensors. Due to the manufacturing process, there is always a dispersion of specimens, which prevents the interchangeability of the components without individual calibration. The aim of the work at the CiS Research Institute is to provide sensors that show a low specimen scatter in the entire temperature range from 4 K to 530 K and are characterized by high accuracy. For this purpose, measurements in the overlapping temperature ranges [4 K to 300 K], [230 K to 410 K] and [320 K to 530 K] are carried out with different setups and different working groups. The measurements in the range between 4 K and 300 K additionally serve to improve the stored physical models of FEM component simulators in order to obtain better simulation results. In the temperature range from 230 K to 410 K, specimen scatters below 0.5 K could be detected. In the high temperature range between 320 K and 530 K long-term tests were carried out (1000 h at 423 K and 400 h at 533 K), which all sensors passed without changes.
