Fabrication and Characterization of a Pressure Sensor using a Pitch-based Carbon Fiber

This paper reports fabrication and characterization of a pressure sensor using a pitch-based carbon fiber. Pitch-based carbon fibers have been shown to exhibit the piezoresistive effect, in which the electric resistance of the carbon fiber changes under mechanical deformation. The main structure of pressure sensors was built by performing backside etching on a SOI wafer and creating a suspended square membrane on the front side. An AC electric field which causes dielectrophoresis was used for the alignment and deposition of a carbon fiber across the microscale gap between two electrodes on the membrane. The fabricated pressure sensors were tested by applying static pressure to the membrane and measuring the resistance change of the carbon fiber. The resistance change of carbon fibers clearly shows linear response to the applied pressure and the calculated sensitivities of pressure sensors are $0.25{\sim}0.35 and 61.8 ${\Omega}/k{\Omega}{\cdot}bar$ for thicker and thinner membrane, respectively. All these observations demonstrated the possibilities of carbon fiber-based pressure sensors.

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