MEMS Based Paramagnetic Oxygen Measurement

This paper describes a novel micromechanical sensor chip that is used to measure the concentration of oxygen in gases by exploiting their physical rather than chemical properties. The so-called magneto-mechanical measurement principle that has been used for oxygen concentration measurements for more than 40 years in classical, precision-mechanical setups has been transferred to the MEMS world. This leads to a new sensor which offers improved performance mainly due to a largely reduced sensor volume, but brings in all the "normal" advantages of batch processing where manual assembly was used up to now.