Silicon-based piezoresistive sensors manufactured using MEMS technologies are ideal for measuring physical quantities such as volume and shape changes, position, inclination, pressure, force, torsion, flow, and acceleration. They can be manufactured in a highly specialized yet variable manner using special wafer production, from the smallest to medium to large quantities, and can be miniaturized to an extreme degree.
Above all, new applications are constantly being found for hybrid silicon strain sensors. Many are made of very different materials with different coefficients of expansion. This leads to a strong dependence of the mechanical strain on the temperature. A highly symmetrical design of the overall system of a sensor element ensures that these mechanical strains do not lead to a strong change in the raw signal. In many configurations, it is necessary to deviate from this design when silicon strain sensors with very low transverse strain sensitivity are required. The price for this is high temperature sensitivity of the zero point of the raw signal due to the different expansion coefficients of the various materials used in the system design. In addition, this results in high calibration costs.
The newly launched NO-TICE research project at the CiS Research Institute involves investigating ways to compensate for the influence of temperature, particularly on the zero point of the raw signal in such sensors, in order to minimize this calibration effort and thus conserve resources (costs, time, materials).
The research and development work described was funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) as part of the research project “Minimization of the temperature dependence of the measurement signal due to zero point shift” (NO-TICE).
Funding code: 49MF240009
