Designing MEMS pressure sensors with integrated circuitry on silicon for miscellaneous applications

The performance of a co-integrated pressure sensor family with on-chip signal processing was optimized with regard to wide pressure ranges for miscellaneous applications. The sensor systems based on silicon and the piezoresistive effect. A systematical approach was developed to determine the electrical behavior of the piezoresistive pressure sensors. The constraint was that for cost efficiency a minimum number of masks of a product mask set should be used for a maximum number of applications. For a family of CMOS integrated pressure sensor systems, this goal could be reached, and wide pressure ranges were covered by just introducing one additional mask level for the implantation of piezoresistors on the pressure membrane.