Highly-sensitive Hydrostatic Semiconductor Pressure Sensors

Abstract

For the hydrostatic pressure calculation, we developed a semiconductor pressure sensor and analyzed the hydrostatic pressure sensitivities of silicon. In previous works, it exhibited a very low sensitivity. However, in this work, the sensitivity was improved drastically by combining p- type (in the nsubstrate) and n-type (in the p-well) resistor sensors with measuring the mid-point voltage of the combined sensor pair. Also, we could increase the sensitivity of hydrostatic pressure by controlling the voltage applied to the combined sensor pair. As an example, for the applied voltage of 20 V to the pair (compared to the previous works), the sensitivity was increased by up to 130 %.