Fabrication and characteristics of vibration sensor using conductive ball

Vibration sensors have a wide scope of applications in the field of monitoring systems that needs to perceive an undesirable physical vibration before a critical failure occurs in a system, and then costly unplanned repairs can be avoided. The conventional vibration sensors developed so far have many disadvantages, such as complex manufacturing process, bulkiness, high cost, less reliability and so on. This paper reports a simple-structured vibration sensor, which has been developed using a commercialized conductive ball and silicon bulk-micromachining technology. The sensor consists of a conductive ball placed in $600{\mu}m$-deep micromachined silicon groove, in which Au thin film has been patterned using a shadow mask technique. Prior to the formation of the Au thin film, the sharp convex corner was rounded for smooth meatl deposition on the non-planar surface at the edge of the groove. The measurement results of the fabricated vibration sensor demonstrate a stable response characteristic to low-frequency vibration range ($1{\sim}30{\;}Hz$).

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