Pressure sensors serve a variety of automotive applications, some which may experience high levels of acceleration such as tire pressure monitoring. To design pressure sensors for high acceleration environments it is important to understand their sensitivity to acceleration especially if thick encapsulation layers are used to isolate the device from the hostile environment in which they reside. This paper describes a modeling approach to determine their sensitivity to acceleration that is very general and is applicable to different device designs and configurations. It also describes the results of device testing of a capacitive surface micromachined pressure sensor at constant acceleration levels from 500 to 2000 g's.

Date Published: 31 August 1999
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 3876, Micromachined Devices and Components V, (31 August 1999); doi: 10.1117/12.360508

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 3876:
Micromachined Devices and Components V
Patrick J. French; Eric Peeters, Editor(s)