Abstract
Piezoresistive pressure sensor have become the successfully-commercialized MEMS product and the related technologies have been well developed over the past decades. Regarding the design methodology, however, the coupled-physics FEM analyses of the transducer itself and the signal-processing circuitry design based on the conventional EDA are separated and both of the analyses were sequentially processed for the full design of the pressure sensor. For the fast and effective R&D, new design methodology is proposed in this paper where the FEM results are linked to the EDA environment and therefore most of the design works can be done in the EDA environments, which means the time-consuming FEM analyses can be minimized. In order to verify the proposed approach, a typical piezoresistive pressure sensor having the silicon diaphragm and piezoresistors was modeled and analyzed based on the proposed methodology. The verification results showed that the simulated results were matched well with the measured data within the 7% difference while the simulation time was reduced less than 5% compared to the conventional methodology. Through the proposed approach, various types of the piezoresistive pressure sensors can be developed in more effective way.
