A combined MEMS thermal vacuum sensor with a wide pressure range
Chuang Yuan, Jianyu Fu, Fan Qu, Qiong Zhou
Abstract
Abstract MEMS thermal vacuum sensors have been widely applied in many academic and industry fields, and pressure range is a key performance of MEMS thermal vacuum sensors. To extend the pressure range, a combined MEMS thermal vacuum sensor that consists of two diode-type MEMS thermal vacuum sensors in series is proposed in this work. The two diode-type sensors are designed to have different areas of sensitive region and distances between sensitive region and heat sink, and their responses to the pressure are from 3.0 × 10 −3 to 3 × 10 4 Pa and from 1.7 × 10 −2 to 4.4 × 10 5 Pa, respectively. By series-connecting them, the combined sensor achieves a pressure range of 1.3 × 10 −3 to 6.9 × 10 5 Pa without any additional control circuit. In addition, it possesses a relatively small size of 400 × 300 μ m 2 . These indicate that the combined MEMS thermal vacuum sensor has the characteristics of wide pressure range, high sensitivity and small size.