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Mechatronics
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Fast analytical design of MEMS capacitive pressure sensors with

sealed cavities
V. Rochus∗, B. Wang, H.A.C. Tilmans, A. Ray Chaudhuri, P. Helin, S. Severi, X. Rottenberg
Imec, Kapeldreef 75, 3001 Heverlee, Belgium

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This paper presents a fast design strategy for MEMS capacitive pressure sensors with sealed cavities.
Received 18 October 2015 Based on circular Kirchhoff-Love plate theory and the perfect gas law, the underlying analytical model
Revised 10 May 2016
allows for a rapid and accurate evaluation of the sensitivity of the sensors, crucial for improving their
Accepted 29 May 2016
design in function of the reference pressure applied in the sealed cavities. The accuracy of the new
Available online xxx
model is demonstrated by comparing its predictions with more computationally expensive simulation
Keywords: techniques (high-order parametric element and three-dimensional finite element models) and with ex-
Capacitive pressure sensor perimental measurements performed on a 300 μm diameter membrane fabricated using the Poly-SiGe
MEMS platform developed at imec.
Analytical expression © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Sealed cavities

1. Introduction 2. Analytical model

MEMS pressure sensors are essential components in application
domains as varied as automotive [1], medical diagnostic, altitude
[2] and depth measurement, or even flow sensing [3]. Having accu-
rate and robust models is crucial to design these devices efficiently,
maximizing their sensitivity, their linearity and resolution. The typ-
ical MEMS membrane-type pressure sensor concept relies on the
presence of a sealed cavity with at least one movable/deformable
wall. Under the effect of the outside pressure, i.e. Pext , the cav-
ity deforms. The pressure measurement is derived from the vari-
ation of cavity deformation, by monitoring for example the local
stress in the deformable membranes with piezoelectric elements,
or its actual displacement through capacitance measurement. Mul-
tiple researches are ongoing on capacitance pressure sensor [4]. Fi-
nite element method [5, 6] or complex numerical model [7] are of-
ten used to design and optimize pressure sensors. However these
methods can become computationally expensive and a simple an-
alytical model is always needed to start the design procedure. For
this reason, more efforts are recently dedicated to propose simple
and fast analytical model in order to have quickly a first estima-
tion of the performance of the device [8–10]. In this paper we de-
velop the analytical expressions of the capacitance and sensitivity
for negative and positive pressure applied on plate with and with-
out sealed cavity. Based on these analytical equations, a fast design
procedure is defined.
∗
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: Veronique.Rochus@imec.be (V. Rochus).
2.1. Circular pressure sensor
The analytical model developed here is based on the classical
Kirchhoff-Love plate theory [11,12,13]. The behavior of a circular
capacitive pressure sensor with clamped edges can be described
using the following two equations:
 2
P R2 − r 2
w (r ) = (1)
64 D(h )
E h3
D (h ) =   (2)
12 1 − υ 2
The first equation expresses the displacement w(r) in terms
of the radial distance r from the center of the edge-clamped cir-
cular membrane of radius R (cf. Fig. 1), subject to an uniformly
distributed transverse pressure load P which is the difference be-
tween the external pressure Pext , pressure above the plate and the
internal pressure Pint , pressure under the plate. The flexural rigid-
ity D(h) is given by Eq. (2), in terms of the membrane thickness h,
Young’s modulus E and Poisson’s ratio υ This model is valid
– for thin plates: the membrane thickness h is here much smaller
than the diameter 2R: h << 2R
– for small displacement: indeed the geometric nonlinearity can
neglected because the membrane thickness h is larger than the
maximum displacement d0 allowed by the gap between the
electrodes h > d0 ≥ w
– with no effect of the shear forces which is often the case for
thin membrane without holes.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mechatronics.2016.05.012
0957-4158/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: V. Rochus et al., Fast analytical design of MEMS capacitive pressure sensors with sealed cavities, Mechatronics
(2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mechatronics.2016.05.012
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Fig. 1. Cross-section of a circular pressure sensor with an open cavity under it.

– when the residual stress is negligible compare to the mechani-

cal deformation: σ0  16hR2
D

When the membrane is composed of multiple layers of differ-

ent homogenous material we can replace E by an equivalent Young’
modulus by the equivalent area method [14, 15].
From Eq. (1) we can easily evaluate the maximum pressure ac-
cepted by the sensor before the two electrodes enter in contact,
i.e. for w(0) = d0 , where d0 is the initial gap. This contact pressure
(Eq. (3)) is directly proportional to the gap d0, the third power of
the thickness h and inversely proportional to the fourth power of Fig. 2. Typical behavior of a circular pressure sensor (see parameters in Table 1).
the radius R:
64 D(h )d0 64 E h3 d0 which can be applied on negative number:
Pm = =   (3)
12 1−μ2 R4  ⎛  ⎞
R 4

atanh c P
) ∂C C0
atanh c P

⎝ 1 −
Pm Pm
This parameter defines the full pressure range of the sensor.
C = C0  and S = =  ⎠
The capacitance C obtained for different pressure loads is eval- c P ∂ P 2|P| 1 − PPm c P
uated by integration on the surface taking the membrane deforma- Pm Pm

tion into account: (7)

R R We can also derive two characteristic points of the device be-
0 2φ0 r
C = 2π r dr =     dr havior.
( d0 − w ( r ) ) d0 1− P
64 Dd0
R2 − r 2 2
The first one is at low pressure. When P tends to 0, the capaci-
0 0
tance is close to the capacitance at rest C0 and the sensitivity tends
(4)
to:
Depending on the pressure sign, this integral results in two dif-
 
∂ C

C0 ε0 πR6 1−μ2
ferent solutions: C |P=0 = C0 and S |P=0 = = = (8)
 P  ∂ P
P=0 3Pm 16 E h3 d0
2

atanh Pm
C = C0  f or P>0 and The sensitivity at P = 0 is then directly proportional to R6 and
P inversely proportional to the h3 and d0 2 . For a given process, larger
Pm is the membrane, larger is the sensitivity.
 |P |
 The second one appears at maximum pressure (P = Pm ). Both
atan Pm capacitance and sensitivity tend to infinity as shown in Fig. 2. In
C = C0  f or P<0 (5)
most practical MEMS cases, the internal pressure is close to vac-
|P |
Pm uum and the total pressure P is then equal to the external pressure
Pext .
Eq. (5) shows that the capacitance always depends on two pa-
ε0 π R 2 Note that we can also increase the sensitivity of a pressure sen-
rameters: the capacitance at rest C0 = d0
and the pressure at sor system by placing several devices in parallel. The total sensitiv-
contact Pm . Indeed, when the pressure is positive and reaches the ity is then the sum of each device sensitivity. However the max-
contact pressure, the electrodes arrive in contact and this capac- imum pressure before contact is a characteristic parameter of the
itance expression tends to infinity. At P = 0 both expressions con- device itself. By increasing the number of devices and then the to-
verge to C0 and when negative pressure tends to -∞, the electrodes tal footprint, we can increase the sensitivity of the sensor keeping
move away from each other and the capacitance tends to 0. the same full pressure range. For this reason, it is better to com-
From these equations, we can compute the sensitivity by differ- pare the sensitivity per square meter which is expressed by
entiating the capacitance with respect to the pressure:
S ∂ Ctot 1 ∂C 1 ∂ Cd 1
⎛  P  ⎞ SA = = =N d = (9)
atanh Atot ∂ P Atot ∂ P N Ad ∂ P Ad
∂ C C0 ⎝ 1 Pm
⎠
S= = −  for P > 0 where Cd and Ad are respectively the capacity and the surface of
∂ P 2P 1 − Pm
P
P
Pm one device, Ctot and Atot are the ones of the full sensor and N is the
⎛  −P  ⎞ number of devices. The sensitivity per square meter is independent
atan of the number of devices and at low pressure, is proportional to
∂C C0
⎝ 1 −
Pm
⎠
S= =  for P < 0 (6) R4
∂ P 2|P| 1 − PPm −P SA ∝ (10)
Pm d02 h3
We can rewrite all these expressions in one formula for both This means that the sensitivity increases for larger mem-
negative and positive pressure loads using the principal square root branes with smaller gaps and thicknesses. For a given process, the

Please cite this article as: V. Rochus et al., Fast analytical design of MEMS capacitive pressure sensors with sealed cavities, Mechatronics
(2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mechatronics.2016.05.012
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Fig. 3. Circular and square pressure sensors placed in parallel in order to increase the sensitivity.

sensitivity of the configuration b) in Fig. 3 is higher than the one of

configuration a) which will in turn reduce the full pressure range
(Pm decreases). Let us investigate what happens if the shape of the
sensor is changed to use a square membrane like in the configura-
tion c) and d).

2.2. Square pressure sensor

Unlike for the circular membrane, the displacement of square Fig. 4. Cross section of a circular pressure sensor with cavity.
pressure sensor can only be analyzed approximately. A simple ex-
pression is [5]
The deformation of the membrane is then affected by the pres-
 2  2
1 a4 x2 y2 sure inside the cavity and the nonlinearity of the problem becomes
w ( x, y ) ≈ P 1− 2 1− 2 (11) stronger:
47 D a a
 
where 2a is the edge length. From this expression, we can estimate (Pext − Pcav (Pext ) ) R2 − r2 2
w (x ) = (16)
the pressure at contact by equating w(0,0) = d0 : 64 D
47D(h )d0 The volume inside the cavity is computed as follows for a given
Pm = (12) total pressure load P:
a4
  2 
which is lower than the maximum pressure of a circular mem-  R  R P R2 − r 2
brane (see Eq. (3)) for the same footprint (R = a). Several models Vcav = 2π r (d0 − w (r ) )dr = 2 r d0 − dr
0 0 64 D
have been proposed to study the behavior of square pressure sen-
sor ([3,16]). However it is difficult to obtain a simple expression of π R6
the capacitance for the full range. We thus estimate it when the = Vcav0 − P (17)
192D
displacement is very small compared to the gap:
  where the initial volume is Vcav0 = π R2 d0 . It decreases when the
a
0 0 a
1 a4 total pressure increases. Assuming an isothermal deformation fol-
C ≈ dxdy ≈ 1+ P
−a ( d 0 − w ( x , y ) ) d 0 −a 47 D lowing the perfect gas law, i.e., “pV=constant”, the pressure in the
 2
2  2
2  cavity is expressed as
x y 64 P
× 1− 1− dxdy = C0 1 + (13) Pcav0Vcav0 Pcav0Vcav0 Pcav0
a2 a2 225 Pm Pcav (P ) = = = (18)
Vcav (P ) π R6 P
Vcav0 − 192 1 − 3PPm
D
4a2 0
where C0 = d0
and the sensitivity around this point is
where Pcav and Vcav are the pressure and the volume inside the
∂C 64 C0 cavity. The “0” subscript indicates the conditions at rest (no de-
≈ (14) flection). The maximum pressure that we can achieve in the cavity
∂ P 225 Pm
is reached when P = Pm which results in a pressure in the cavity of
In order to compare the sensitivity of the square and the cir- 3
2 Pcav0 .
cular membrane, this expression has to be written in terms of di- The total pressure load applied on the membrane now follows
mensions and material properties: a nonlinear equation:

∂ C

a6 0 ∂ C

R6 0 Pcav0
≈ 0.024 2 > circular = 0.016 2 (15) P = Pext − (19)
∂ P
square d0 D ( h ) ∂ P
d0 D ( h ) 1− P
3Pm

For the same footprint (R = a) and the same process, the square which has as solution
membrane thus has a higher sensitivity than the circular one, but its 
full pressure range is smaller. In Fig. 3 the pressure sensor with the (3Pm − Pext ) − (3Pm − Pext )2 + 12Pcav0 Pm
P = Pext + (20)
higher sensitivity is the configuration d). 2
The total pressure load applied on the membrane is then lower
2.3. Circular pressure sensor with applied pressure inside a sealed than the external pressure and increases slowly when the external
cavity pressure increases, as shown in Fig. 5.
As a consequence, the maximum external pressure before con-
One additional complexity can be taken into account in the de- tact is increased. Indeed the contact between electrodes is reached
sign of MEMS pressure sensors by controlling the pressure inside when the total pressure P is equal to Pm and the maximum exter-
the cavity under the membrane as shown in Fig. 4. nal pressure Pext max is then
As the membrane deforms, the volume of the cavity can 3
strongly vary, thus strongly impacting the cavity internal pressure. Pext max = Pm + Pcav0 (21)
2
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Fig. 5. Total pressure vs. external pressure for Pcav0 = 20 0 0mbar and Pm = 20 0mbar.
Fig. 7. Effect of the temperature on the sensitivity for a 600 μm diameter pressure
sensor with a Pcav0 = 200mbar at initial temperature (blue) and with a variation
T of 100 °C (green). (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure
legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

Fig. 6. Simulation of the sensitivity for a 300 μm SiGe pressure sensor described
in Table 1 for Pcav0 = 0mbar (blue), 100mbar (green), 200mbar (red) and 300mbar Fig. 8. Cross-section of a typical imec SiGe pressure sensor..
(cyan). (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the
reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
If the pressure Pcav0 is set at a temperature Tinit , a variation of
temperature T will result in a variation of pressure:
The capacitance is still computed by Eq. (7), where P follows
the nonlinear expression (20) and the sensitivity to the external Pcav0
Pcav = T
pressure is ∂∂PC = ∂∂ CP ∗ ∂∂PP : Tinit
ext ext

⎛  P
⎞ By controlling the temperature of the system, we can then tune
atanh c
the pressure range of the sensor. Fig. 7 shows that by increasing
∂C C0
⎝ 1 −
Pm
⎠∗
=  the temperature by 100 °C the full pressure range is increased by
∂ Pext 2|P | 1 − PP
m
c P 100 mbar. In this simulation we considered that the material prop-
Pm
  erties of the sensor didn’t change.
1 (3Pm − Pext )
× −  (22)
2 2 (3Pm − Pext )2 + 12Pcav0 Pm 3. Imec’s SiGe pressure sensor

The sensitivity decreases when the initial pressure inside the
cavity increases. Indeed, the first component ∂∂ CP is reduced because
the total pressure is lower than the external pressure and the sec-
ond component ∂∂PP is lower than 1 when the pressure inside the
ext
cavity increases. So by increasing the pressure inside the cavity, we
increase the range of the pressure sensor but we also decrease its
sensitivity. However we can see on Fig. 6 that the decrease in sen-
sitivity is negligible compare to the increase of the full pressure
range.
Note that the pressure in the cavity following the perfect gas
law, is also dependent on the temperature:
PcavVcav = nRT .
The pressure sensor technology considered in this paper is
a thin film surface-micromachined capacitive device from imec’s
silicon-germanium (SiGe) platform [17], which allows the mono-
lithic integration of a multitude of MEMS-based sensors and actu-
ators above CMOS [18]. The technology is based on surface micro-
machining using polysilicon germanium (poly-SiGe) as the struc-
tural MEMS layer and silicon oxide as the sacrificial material. An
additional layer of Silicon Nitride is deposited over the SiGe struc-
ture to seal the sensor. The deformable membrane of the pressure
sensor is then composed of a layer of SiGe and SiN (see Fig. 8).
The typical dimensions and the material properties of the two lay-
ers forming the membrane are presented in Table 1; a fabricated
300 μm diameter device is pictured in Fig. 9.

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Table 1 the electrodes provide directly the output capacitance of the pres-
Dimensions and material properties of a typical imec SiGe pressure sensor
sure sensor. The “Fluid” domain is composed of the external pres-
as well as the equivalent Young’s modulus obtained by the equivalent area
method. sure on the upper surface and the pressure inside the cavity with
a very high leakage resistance.
Diameter 300μm Gap 1 μm
Fig. 11 shows the full COMSOL model which represents accu-
SiGe SiN Equivalent material rately the mechanical behavior of the membrane (material proper-
Thickness 4 μm 1.5μm 5.5μm ties, stress and geometrical nonlinearity), but also taking the shape
Young’s modulus 130GPa 200GPa 160 GPa of the anchors into account.
Poisson ratio 0.22 0.3
Fig. 12 shows the capacitance computed using the three dif-
Mass density 4400 kg/m3 2880 kg/m3
Residual stress 40MPa -100MPa negligible ferent models and compares them to experimental measurements
performed on two different 300 μm SiGe pressure sensors with
vacuum inside the cavity. All the results are in excellent agreement,
which also means that our simple analytical model is sufficient to
design these types of sensors. The tensile stress in the SiGe layer
(40 MPa) is compensated by the compressive stress in the SiN layer
and the linear model without stress is sufficient.
Fig. 13 shows the comparison between the analytical expression
and the MEMS+ solution for the same pressure sensor but with
and without pressure inside the cavity. The analytical model fits
very well the numerical results of MEMS+, which validates the an-
alytical developments carried out for taking into account the pres-
sure inside the sealed cavity.
Besides the computation time, the advantage of the analytical
solution is to provide clear insights on the effect of the different
design parameters on the performance of the sensor. It should of
course be noted that the shape in the case under study is relatively
Fig. 9. Picture of a 300 μm diameter imec SiGe pressure sensor. simple and that the analytical model would have to be enhanced in
order to take into account design variations, such as square or dual
thickness membranes or nonlinear behavior that can occur if the
In the case of the actual imec SiGe pressure sensor, the pressure membrane performs large displacement or when residual stress is
inside the cavity is close to vacuum (Pcav = 0). This design verify- no more negligible.
ing the hypotheses of Kirchhoff-Love plate theory, Eq. (5) can be
used to compute the capacitance for different external pressures.
The equivalent Young’s modulus taking both the SiGe and the SiN 5. Design of a new pressure sensor
layers into account is calculated to be 160 GPa for a thickness of
5.5 μm. The pressure to reach the contact Pm is about 2900 mbar The current imec SiGe pressure sensors with a diameter of
for 300 μm diameter SiGe pressure sensors which correspond to 300 μm show a mean sensitivity of 1fF/mbar/mm2 and a non-
the blue curve in Fig. 6. linearity of 0.5% for a range from 300 mbar to 1100 mbar. The first
goal of this design procedure is to increase the sensitivity keep-
4. Numerical models ing the non-linearity lower than 1%. Following Eq. (8), in order to
enhance the sensitivity, we could simply increase the size of the
In order to validate the analytical model, a high-order paramet- membrane. Increasing the radius to 350 μm, for example, leads to
ric element method (from MEMS+ [19]) and a three-dimensional a sensitivity predicted by the analytical model of 3fF/mbar/mm2 .
finite element model (from COMSOL [20]) are used. However the non-linearity would also increase to 2.5%. The model
A fourth of the MEMS+ pressure sensor model is presented in suggests that the pressure inside the cavity is a parameter that we
Fig. 10. The mechanical domain is composed of multiple plate ele- can use to reduce the non-linearity. Indeed when the membrane is
ments taking the two material layers (SiN and SiGe) into account deformed, the pressure inside the cavity increases and reduces the
as well as the mechanical stresses in each layer given in Table deformation as well as the non-linearity. If the pressure inside the
1 and geometrical nonlinearity hypothesis. In the electric domain, cavity is 300 mbar, at the minimum of the external pressure (also

Fig. 10. MEMS+ model: plate elements and their connection nodes on the left and the displacement field on the right.

Please cite this article as: V. Rochus et al., Fast analytical design of MEMS capacitive pressure sensors with sealed cavities, Mechatronics
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Fig. 11. COMSOL mesh on the left and displacement simulation taking the real anchor shape into account on the right.

Fig. 13. Comparison between analytical solution and MEMS+ solution for the
Fig. 12. Comparison between the analytical model, the MEMS+ model, the COMSOL 300 μm pressure sensor without pressure in the cavity and with 300 mbar inside
model and two experimental measurements. the cavity.

As a final design experiment, we will design a pressure sen-

300 mbar), the membrane is flat compared to the case where there
is vacuum inside the cavity (see Fig. 14).
Fig. 15 shows the capacitance for the different external pres-
sures when the pressure inside cavity is 0 mbar and 300 mbar.
The cavity pressure clearly linearizes the capacitance, but de-
creases the sensitivity. In this case we reduce the non-linearity
from 2.5% to 1%, but the mean sensitivity is also decreased from 3
to 2fF/mbar/mm2. So by increasing the membrane size to 350 μm
and applying a pressure inside the cavity of 300mbar, we can dou-
ble the sensitivity keeping the non-linearity under 1%.
sor that fit in a footprint of 400 × 400μm2 . The main goal is to
gain a maximum of sensitivity keeping the system far from con-
tact behavior. We use the numerical simulation tools to investi-
gate the effect of a square membrane. The analytical solution pre-
dicts a higher sensitivity and a lower contact pressure compared to
the circular sensor. Fig. 16 shows the simulations performed with
MEMS+ for 350 μm circular and square membranes with vacuum
and 300mbar inside the cavity. As observed with the analytical
model of the circular membrane, the pressure inside the cavity de-
creases the non-linearity but decreases also the sensitivity. We can

Fig. 14. Deformation of a 350 μm pressure sensor for an external pressure varying between 300 mbar and 1100 mbar with vacuum inside the cavity on the left and with a
cavity pressure of 300 mbar on the right.

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Fig. 15. Capacitance for different external pressures with a cavity pressure of 0 bar
and 300mbar.
Fig. 16. Circular and square 350 μm-pressure sensors with vacuum and 300 mbar
inside the cavity.
Fig. 17. Circular and square 400 μm-pressure sensors with vacuum and 300mbar
inside the cavity.
also observe that for the same footprint, the sensitivity of square
membranes (5fF/mbar/mm2 ) is larger than that of circular ones
(3fF/mbar/mm2 ). However it is important to note that the stress
generated in the corner of the square membrane is much higher
than in the circular case. Therefore designers typically round the
corners of square membranes in order to increase their reliability
without modifying their performance.
Finally if the diameter of the pressure sensor is increased to
400 μm, the square and the circular membranes reach their con-
tact pressure around 700 mbar for the square one and 950 mbar
for the circular one (Fig. 17). This unfortunately means that the
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7
electrodes are in contact in the middle of the dynamic range.
By adding 300mbar inside the cavity, we can push these critical
points out of the dynamic range and reach a mean sensitivity of
5fF/mbar/mm2 for the circular membrane and 12fF/mbar/mm2 for
the square membrane.
6. Conclusions
In this paper we proposed an analytical model for the fast de-
sign of MEMS pressure sensors and validated it with both com-
parisons to numerical simulators (high-order parametric element
method from MEMS+ and Finite Element method from COM-
SOL) and experimental measurements. We then used the analyti-
cal model to investigate design variation of the imec SiGe pressure
sensor. In particular, we highlighted the advantageous effect that
the internal cavity pressure can have on the linearity of the sensor.
The initial imec SiGe 300 μm circular membranes showed a sensi-
tivity of 1fF/mbar/mm2 . Keeping the same technology, a 400 μm
square membrane with a pressure of 300mbar inside the cavity
can reach a mean sensitivity of 12fF/mbar/mm2 i.e., lead to a ten-
fold increase in sensitivity.
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[20] http://www.comsol.com/products