Design and simulation of one-port resonant- piezoresistive strain sensor

In this paper, the design, simulation and microfabrication process flow of an electrostatically actuated resonant strain sensor have been presented. This design is a combination of resonant and piezoresistive strain sensors. The resonator circuit makes use of piezoresistive elements conditioning circuit to drive the resonator. The resonator is a resonant sensor consisting of a doubly-clamped beam (DCB) excited as one-port microbridge. The one-port configuration was selected because of the simplicity and repeatability in the microfabrication process. The microfabrication process flow has been realized based on standard bulk micromachining technique.