Pressure sensor using a sensitive liquid cantilever diaphragm 2016-17

CHAPTER -1

INTRODUCTION
Absolute pressure sensors have been playing an important role in many industrial
applications, for example car navigation systems, personal mobile devices and environment
monitoring systems. Conventional MEMS absolute pressure sensors are generally based on a
silicon diaphragm and a pressure reference cavity. In these sensors, absolute pressure is
derived from the deformation of the diaphragm, which is usually capacitive type or piezo-
electric type or piezo-resistive type. However, it is difficult for these sensors to improve their
sensitivity up to the range of a few Pa, since the silicon diaphragm is relatively stiff. So far,
the resolution of pressure measurement has been around 10 Pa. Micro cantilever is more
flexible than diaphragm, yet it can merely measure the differential pressure since the air is
leaked through the gap.

In this paper, we take advantage of liquid’s surface tension to fabricate a highly sensitive
cantilever-based diaphragm, by using liquid to bridge in the cantilever’s gap. The concept of
this research is shown in Figure 1.1. An air cavity was designed under the liquid-cantilever
diaphragm as a reference pressure. The point is that the gap’s size was down-scaled to a few
micrometers, so that liquids do not leak through the gap. The function of the liquid bridge
here is to prevent the air leak through the cantilever’s gap. As the result, when there is
difference in pressure between the cavity and ambient environment, that pressure difference
is applied to the liquid-cantilever diaphragm. Since both of cantilever and liquid are easy to
be deformed, the proposed diaphragm is much sensitive than conventional rigid diaphragms.
In addition, due to the low Reynolds number at the gap area, the viscous force is supposedly
dominant in comparison with inertial force. Therefore, the motion of liquid within the gap
space may have some effects on the deformation of the cantilever. However, since the total
area of the gap was much smaller than the surface area of cantilever, the effects due to liquid
motion can be ignored.

In experiments, we investigated the liquid leak with different gap sizes and different types of
liquid. We also characterized the proposed sensor in response to pressure difference. The
result showed a tendency that using liquid with high viscosity would provide better linearity

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and stability, in comparison with the case of smaller viscosity. Furthermore, since surface
tension and viscosity of liquid supposedly depends on the ambient temperature, the pressure
response of the sensor with the variance of cavity’s temperature was also evaluated.
Experiment results indicate that the sensor’s sensitivity can be improved by choosing proper
liquid with proper design of piezo-resistive cantilever. In our prototype sensor, the piezo-
resistive cantilever was ultrathin, with the thickness of 300 nm. Resolution of measurement
was 0.9 Pa in case of using HIVAC-F5 silicon oil.

Figure 1.1: Schematic design of the pressure sensor. Liquid was used to fill the gap
between the cantilever and the surrounding walls.

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CHAPTER -2

LITERATURE SURVEY
[1] J. N. Palasagaram and R. Ramadoss, “MEMS capacitive pressure sensor fabricated
using printed circuit processing techniques,” IEEE Sensors Journal, 2006.

Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)-based capacitive pressure sensors are typically

fabricated using silicon-micromachining techniques. In this paper, a novel liquid-crystal
polymer (LCP)-based MEMS-capacitive pressure sensor, fabricated using printed-circuit-
processing technique, is reported. The pressure sensor consists of a cylindrical cavity
formed by a sandwich of an LCP substrate, an LCP spacer layer with circular holes, and an
LCP top layer. The bottom electrode and the top electrode of the capacitive pressure sensor
are defined on the top side of the LCP substrate and the bottom side of the top-LCP layer,
respectively. An example pressure sensor with a diaphragm radius of 1.6 mm provides a
total capacitance change of 0.277 pF for an applied pressure in the range of 0-100 kPa.

[2] M.X. Zhou, Q.A Huang, M. Qin and W. Zhou, “A novel capacitive pressure sensor
based on sandwich structures,” Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems, 2005.

This paper presents a sandwich structure for a capacitive pressure sensor. The sensor was
fabricated by a simple three-mask process and sealed in vacuum by anodic bonding. The
sensor, which utilizes a combined SiO/sub 2//Si/sub 3/N/sub 4/ layers as the elastic
dielectric layers, exhibits high sensitivity. Mechanical characteristics of the sensor are
theoretically analyzed based on a composite membrane theory and evaluated by use of finite
element analysis (FEA).

[3] H. Baltes and O. Brand, “CMOS-based microsensors and packaging,” Sens. Actuat. A,
2002.

CMOS-based microsensors benefit from well-established fabrication technologies and the

possibility of on-chip circuitry. In these devices, added on-chip functionality can be
implemented, such as calibration, self testing, and digital interfaces. The paper summarizes

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major technological approaches to CMOS-based microsensors. Two packaged

microsystems, namely a thermal imager and a chemical microsystem, fabricated using
CMOS technology in combination with bulk-micromachining and thin film deposition, are
reviewed. Finally, CMOS microsensors for the characterization and optimization of ball
bonding processes in the microelectronics packaging industry are presented.

[4] C.L. Dai, Y.W. Tai and P.H. Kao, “Modeling and fabrication of micro FET pressure
sensor with circuits,” Sensors Journal, 2007.

This paper presents the simulation, fabrication and characterization of a micro FET (field
effect transistor) pressure sensor with readout circuits. The pressure sensor includes 16
sensing cells in parallel. Each sensing cell that is circular shape is composed of an MOS
(metal oxide semiconductor) and a suspended membrane, which the suspended membrane is
the movable gate of the MOS. The Coventor Ware is used to simulate the behaviors of the
pressure sensor, and the HSPICE is employed to evaluate the characteristics of the circuits.
The pressure sensor integrated with circuits is manufactured using the commercial 0.35 μm
CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) process and a post-process. In order to
obtain the suspended membranes, the pressure sensor requires a post-CMOS process. The
post-process adopts etchants to etch the sacrificial layers in the pressure sensors to release
the suspended membranes, and then the etch holes in the pressure sensor are sealed by
LPCVD (low pressure chemical vapor deposition) parylene. The pressure sensor produces a
change in current when applying a pressure to the sensing cells. The circuits are utilized to
convert the current variation of the pressure sensor into the voltage output. Experimental
results show that the pressure sensor has a sensitivity of 0.032 mV/kPa in the pressure range
of 0-500 kPa.

[5] Y. Jin and J. Zhang, “MEMS vacuum packaging technology and applications,” 5th
International Conference on Electronic Packaging Technology, 2003.

Many MEMS (micro electro-mechanic systems) parts have to meet the requirements for
vacuum packaging. In vacuum packaging, leakage and gas permeation, which affects the
normal function of the components, are major problems. Hermetic sealing is one of the most
important technologies for reliable vacuum packaging. In this paper, several hermetic sealing

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technologies for vacuum packaging was presented, including eutectic bonding, adhesive
bonding, glass frit bonding, and silicon-glass anodic bonding. Furthermore, the author
introduced two approaches to deal with sealing imperfect surface caused by electric feed
throughs, which link to the outside of the small cavity of MEMS sensors. The getter was
discussed as it is essential to keep the vacuum environment inside the cavity of device since
the inner walls might release gas after hermetic seal.

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CHAPTER -3

DESIGN AND MEASUREMENT CONCEPT

The conceptual structure of our device is shown in Figure 1.1. Different from diaphragm, a
piezo-resistive cantilever has a gap through which air exchanges between the upper and the
inner sides of the cantilever. An air cavity was placed under the diaphragm as a reference
pressure source. The idea here is to use liquid to prevent air leak through the gap. Yet the
original point of our proposed structure is that, the liquid is kept to hang within the gap and
not to leak through the gap. By miniaturizing the cantilever’s gap, we suppose that this
structure is much more sensitive than conventional diaphragm, since the 300 nm thick
cantilever is ultra-sensitive and easily deformed compared with rigid diaphragms.

Consider the surface tension of liquid within the gap, according to Young-Laplace equation,
we have P1-P2= ∆P=2γH ……………………………………………………………(1)
where ∆P is the pressure difference between the pressure inside liquid (P1) and the pressure
of the air cavity (P2), γ is the surface tension, H is the mean curvature of the liquid surface
hanging within the gap. Since the maximum value of H is 2/g, in which g is the gap’s size,
the threshold pressure for the proposed structure is expressed as the following
Pmax = γ/g ……………………………………………………………………………(2)
Threshold pressure here is defined as the maximum pressure difference across the liquid
surface which allows the liquid not to leak through the gap. For a certain liquid at certain
temperature, its surface tension is generally a constant. Therefore, according to equation (2),
the threshold pressure of liquid leak is higher with smaller gap. In the other words, liquid is
unlikely to leak if the gap is designed small enough.

Besides the liquid pressure and cavity’s pressure, the ambient pressure must be concerned as
well. Note that there are two air-liquid interfaces in our model. The first one is mentioned
above, which is the interface within the gap, between liquid and air in the cavity. For
convenience, we define this interface as the inner liquid surface. The second one is the
surface between liquid and the ambient air outside (P0). We define the second interface as
the external liquid surface. Surface tension at the external liquid surface can also be

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expressed by Equation (1). Without loss of generality, we assume the ambient pressure and
the cavity’s pressure is equal (i.e. P0 = P1).

Consider the ambient pressure changes in an amount of ∆p, for example due to the change
in absolute altitude. This pressure difference is the pressure applied on the liquid-cantilever
diaphragm and causes the piezo-resistive cantilever to bend. This means that we can obtain
∆p by measuring the displacement of the piezo-resistive cantilever. The displacement of the
cantilever is indeed derived from its resistance change.

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CHAPTER -4

FABRICATION PROCESS
The fabrication process steps of piezo-resistive cantilever and of the sensor device are
described in this section. For fabricating cantilever with small gap (e.g. few μm size), photo-
lithography is rather difficult. Thus, EB-lithography was used in our process.

Electron-beam lithography (often abbreviated as e-beam lithography) is the practice of

scanning a focused beam of electrons to draw custom shapes on a surface covered with an
electron-sensitive film called a resist (exposing).The electron beam changes the solubility of
the resist, enabling selective removal of either the exposed or non-exposed regions of the
resist by immersing it in a solvent (developing). The purpose, as with photolithography, is to
create very small structures in the resist that can subsequently be transferred to the substrate
material, often by etching. The primary advantage of electron-beam lithography is that it can
draw custom patterns (direct-write) with sub-10 nm resolution. This form of maskless
lithography has high resolution and low throughput, limiting its usage
to photomask fabrication, low-volume production of semiconductor devices, and research
and development.

We used a 0.3 μm / 0.4 μm / 300 μm thick SOI wafer. The Most commonly used in MEMS
and advanced CMOS integrated circuit fabrication, SOI wafers (Figure 4.1) provide a
manufacturing solution which helps reduce power and heat while increasing the speed
performance of a device. SOI wafers are a three layer material stack composed of the
following: Active layer of prime quality silicon (DEVICE LAYER) over a buried layer
(BOX) of electrically insulating silicon dioxide, over a bulk silicon support wafer
(HANDLE). SOI wafers are unique products which are custom built for specific end-user
applications. SVM offers two types of SOI: Thick Film and Thin Film.

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Figure 4.1: Silicon on insulator wafers (SOI)

Figure 4.3 shows the fabrication process of piezo-resistive cantilever. In the first step, an N-
type resistor layer was first formed on the surface of the SOI by the rapid thermal diffusion,
and an EB-resist layer was spin-coated on the surface. Next, EB-lithography was used to
design the shape of the cantilever, with small gap. The smallest gap can be designed in our
method was 200 nm. After EB-lithography, we used electron beam physical vapor deposition
to form a Cr/Au layer.

Electron beam physical vapor deposition, or EBPVD (Figure 4.2), is a form of physical vapor
deposition in which a target anode is bombarded with an electron beam given off by a
charged tungsten filament under high vacuum. The electron beam causes atoms from the
target to transform into the gaseous phase. These atoms then precipitate into solid form,
coating everything in the vacuum chamber (within line of sight) with a thin layer of the
anode material

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Figure 4.2: Electron beam physical vapor deposition

The thickness of the Cr layer and Au layer were 3 nm and 30 nm, respectively. Then the
Cr/Au layer deposited on EB-resist was lifted off by using piranha solution, which is a
mixture of sulfuric acid (H2SO4) and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). After that the device
silicon layer was etched by using ICP-RIE (Inductive Coupled Plasma - Reactive Ion
Etching). Then the Cr layer and Au layer were wet-etched to remove the metal layer on the
surface of the piezo-resister. The bottom-side silicon layer (handle Si) was etched by ICP-
RIE from the backside. And the piezo-resistive cantilever was released by etching the glass
layer with hydrofluoric acid (HF) vapor.

1. Form N-type resistor and EB-resist on an SOI

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2. Deposit Cr/Au after nano EB-lithography

3. Lift-off to form μm-size gap

4. Etch device Si and pattern Cr/Au to form electrodes

5. Etch handle Si and SiO2 layer to form cantilever

Figure 4.3: Fabrication process flow of the piezo-resistive cantilever with a-few-μm size
gap.

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300nm thick

100 μm

device

10 mm

Figure 4.4: Fabrication process flow of the device

The fabricated piezo-resistive cantilever chip was then attached on an electrode-patterned

substrate. The substrate also had hydrophobic pattern (Figure 4.4). Then liquid was put on
the cantilever chip. The proposed sensor device was complete after attaching an air cavity
under the substrate. The photographs of fabricated piezo-resistive cantilever and sensor
device are also shown in Figure 3.

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CHAPTER -5

SENSOR EVALUATION
Experiment of liquid leak is described in this section. Since different liquid has different
surface tension, it is necessary to design the gap size appropriate with the surface tension. We
fabricated cantilevers with different gap, which were 1 μm, 2 μm, 3 μm, 5 μm and 10 μm.
The photographs are shown in Figure 4.

Figure 5.1: Photographs of piezo-resistive cantilevers with different gap sizes.

And we used 3 types of liquid, which were silicone oils (HIVAC F-5 and HIVAC F-4, Shin-
Etsu Chemical Co. Ltd, Japan) and water. Among 3 types of liquid, HIVAC F-5 has lowest
surface tension and water has highest one. The result of liquid leak test is shown in Table 1.

Table 5.1: Result of liquid leak test. HIVAC F-5 and HIVAC F-4 were silicone fluidic oils.

Gap size HIVAC HIVAC Water

F-5 F-4
1 μm No leak No leak No leak
3 μm No leak No leak No leak
5 μm Leak No leak No leak
10 μm Leak Leak No leak

The test was done in room temperature (25 °C). Water did not leak for all gap sizes, due to its
high surface tension. Meanwhile, HIVAC F-4 showed leakage with gap size of 10 μm.
HIVAC F-5 leaked with gap size of 5 μm. In fact, the surface tension of HIVAC F-4 and
HIVAC F-5 are almost the same: 33.9 dyne/cm and 34.3 dyne/cm, respectively). But the
viscosity of HIVAC F-5 (160 mm2/s) is much larger than that of HIVAC F-4 (37 mm2/s).
Therefore, we suggest that not only surface tension but viscosity is also an important factor

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concerned with the liquid leak through the gap. Pressure characteristic of the proposed
pressure sensor was investigated. In this experiment, we evaluated the sensor by using
cantilever with gap size of 3 μm, combined with different liquids. The experimental setup is
shown in Figure 5.

pressure generator

P+

P-

sensor

Figure 5.2: Experimental setup pressure generator was used to control the pressure
difference of upside and downside of the liquid-cantilever diaphragm

A pressure generator was used to control the pressure difference between the upside and the
downside of the liquid-cantilever diaphragm. The pressure difference was varied from 0 Pa to
100 Pa. The resistance change of the piezo-resistive cantilever was measured by using
Wheatstone bridge circuit. A Wheatstone bridge is an electrical circuit used to measure an
unknown electrical resistance by balancing two legs of a bridge circuit, one leg of which
includes the unknown component. The primary benefit of a wheatstone bridge is its ability to
provide extremely accurate measurements. Its operation is similar to the
original potentiometer.

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Figure 5.3: wheatstone bridge circuit.

In the figure, Rx is the unknown resistance to be measured; R1, R2 and R3 are resistors of
known resistance and the resistance of R2 is adjustable. If the ratio of the two resistances in
the known leg ( R2 /R1 ) is equal to the ratio of the two in the unknown leg ( Rx / R3 ) then
the voltage between the two midpoints (B and D) will be zero and no current will flow
through the galvanometer VG If the bridge is unbalanced, the direction of the current
indicates whether R2 is too high or too low. R2 is varied until there is no current through the
galvanometer, which then reads zero.

Detecting zero current with a galvanometer can be done to extremely high accuracy.
Therefore, if R1, R2and R3 are known to high precision, then Rx can be measured to high
precision. Very small changes in Rx disrupt the balance and are readily detected.

At the point of balance, the ratio of R2 / R1 = Rx / R3

Rx = (R2 / R1). R3

Alternatively, if R1, R2 and R3 are known, but R2 is not adjustable, the voltage difference
across or current flow through the meter can be used to calculate the value of
Rx using Kirchhoff's circuit laws (also known as Kirchhoff's rules). This setup is frequently
used in strain gauge and resistance thermometer measurements, as it is usually faster to read
a voltage level off a meter than to adjust a resistance to zero the voltage

Raw data of this experiment is showed in Figure 5.4.

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ON OFF
0
Apply pressure
V
∆
ol P
=
ta Calculated
20
-20 resolution
ge Pa
[ = 0.9 Pa
m
V] -40
0 2 4 6 8 10

Time[s]

Figure 5.4: Real-time data in the evaluation of sensor’s pressure characteristic. The
applied pressure was controlled to increase 20 Pa

The liquid was HIVAC F-5. The applied pressure was 20 Pa. The resolution of measurement
was calculated to be 0.9 Pa. Figure 5.5 shows the response of the sensor to the change in
pressure difference.

0.4
HIVAC F-5
HIVAC F-4
0.3
Water
0.2 gap = 3 μm

0.1

0
∆R/R [-] × 10-3 0 20 40 60 80 100

Pressure [Pa]

Figure 5.5: Sensor response using three different types of liquid. HIVAC F-5 and
HIVAC F-4 were silicon oils

Among the 3 liquid samples, HIVAC F-5 had the finest sensitivity. The result indicates that
the sensitivity was higher for liquids that had higher viscosity. In addition, since the liquid’s
viscosity generally depends on ambient temperature, the dependence on air cavity’s
temperature was needed to be specified. According to the result in Figure 5.6, when the

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temperature was increased from 25 degrees to 50 degrees, the sensor’s response dropped
quickly.

0.2 liquid =HIVAC F-4

[-]
-- gap = 3 μm
33
× pressure = 100 Pa
1 0.1
R0-
R/
3∆ Sample number = 3
0
20 40 60 80 100

Temperature (ºC)

Figure 5.6: Dependence on cavity’s temperature

However, for temperature higher than 50 degrees, the response seemed to be converged. We
suppose that in high temperature, liquid’s surface tension decreases and that would lessen the
deformation of the piezo-resistive cantilever.

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CONCLUSION

In this paper, we propose a highly sensitive diaphragm for pressure sensor, by using liquid to
bridge the gap of a micro piezo-resistive cantilever. The liquid fills in but does not leak
through the gap, as long as the gap is down-scaled to micro/nano size. We have characterized
the pressure sensor, with different types of liquid, and different sizes of cantilever’s gap as
well. The experiment results demonstrated that, by miniaturizing the gap and choosing
liquids with high dynamic viscosity, we can obtain measurement resolution of sub 1Pa.
Silicone fluidic oil was used due to its physical stability and low evaporation rate. Although
the sensitivity is 0.9 Pa, it can be improved by choosing appropriate liquid and gap size.
Nevertheless, the proposed pressure sensor also has simple fabrication, low cost and low
power consumption. Our proposed sensor may lead to application in water, such as
hydrophone or measuring the force applied on liquid surface.

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REFERENCES

[1] J. N. Palasagaram and R. Ramadoss, “MEMS capacitive pressure sensor fabricated

using printed circuit processing techniques,” IEEE Sensors Journal, vol. 6, pp. 1374–
1375, 2006.
[2] M.X. Zhou, Q.A Huang, M. Qin and W. Zhou, “A novel capacitive pressure sensor
based on sandwich structures,” Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems, vol. 14,
pp. 1272-1282, 2005
[3] H. Baltes and O. Brand, “CMOS-based microsensors and packaging,” Sens. Actuat.
A, vol. 92, pp. 1-9, 2002
[4] C.L. Dai, Y.W. Tai and P.H. Kao, “Modeling and fabrication of micro FET pressure
sensor with circuits,” Sensors Journal, vol. 7, pp. 3386-3398, 2007
[5] Y. Jin and J. Zhang, “MEMS vacuum packaging technology and applications,” 5th
International Conference on Electronic Packaging Technology, pp. 301-306, 2003

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