MEMS for detection of environmental pollutants: A review pertains to sensors over a couple of decades in 21st century

Abstract

Abstract Micro Electro Mechanical Systems has gained significant attention in recent years for the trace level detection of Environmental pollution. Due to miniaturized size and expectance of superior performance, MEMS design and modeling plays a crucial role in sensor fabrication. MEMS sensors fabrication is a challenging task and thus requires a precise balance between novel ideas tempered with process integration. Unless of which low quality sensors may get fabricated resulting in poor performance, wastage of time and increased cost of production. To anticipate these losses, one should have clear idea of fabrication processes, difficulties involved in practical realization and optimized fabrication recipes. One should always have handful of information about feasibility of MEMS structures before actual fabrication. This review outlines various reported aspects of MEMS sensors, such as sensing performance, power and its design optimization using software simulation, packaging and testing. This work has reported advancements in the process flow for fabrication of MEMS sensors over a couple of decades. Although there exist many reviews for MEMS, but all of them would stands for particular domain. For example some reviews cover only material used and suggest probable combination of materials for future sensing. Some reviews justify the structures and geometries of MEMS and some of them just studied the packaging and testing of MEMS. i.e. reviews done on MEMS sensors so far were in discrete form. Literature that brings complete information of MEMS sensors altogether can be rarely seen. This work intends to bridge this gap and provide complete, comprehensive and in-depth ideas about the design of a sensor, its software simulation, selection of application specific sensing materials, fabrication and up to the final level device testing optimized in all aspects for future study.