Thermal compensation of semiconductor strain gauge type pressure transducers using a real-time process

A method is described in which digital computing techniques are used in conjunction with custom-built hardware to improve the thermal stability of semiconductor strain-gauge-type pressure transducers. The basic design philosophy is discussed. Preliminary laboratory results on a sample of twelve transducers have been very encouraging, providing compensated values (as a temperature coefficient presented as a function of the full-scale pressure range) on the order of ±0.002%FS/°C. On some devices this represents an improvement of approximately two orders of magnitude over the corresponding uncompensated value