A doubly anchored surface micromachined Pirani gauge for vacuum package characterization

Author

Stark, Brian H. ; Mei, Yuhai ; Zhang, Chunbo ; Najafi, Khalil

Author_Institution

Center for Wireless Integrated Microsystems, Michigan Univ., Ann Arbor, MI, USA

fYear

2003

fDate

19-23 Jan. 2003

Firstpage

506

Lastpage

509

Abstract

This paper presents a surface micromachined Pirani gauge for measuring vacuum pressure inside sealed micro cavities. This thin gap (800nm) SiO₂/Si₃N₄/SiO₂ gauge can measure absolute pressure from atmospheric to less than 1mTorr without sophisticated interface electronics by using a reliable software calibration technique. This allows the sensor to be integrated with common vacuum packaging technologies to measure leak rates as low as 10^-17cm³/s. This represents a 5 order of magnitude improvement over traditional helium leak testing with a substantially reduced cost.

Keywords

micromachining; microsensors; pressure measurement; pressure sensors; silicon compounds; 1 atm to 1 mtorr; 800 nm; SiO₂/Si₃N₄/SiO₂ gauge; absolute pressure measurement; doubly anchored surface micromachined Pirani gauge; leak rates; reliable software calibration technique; vacuum package characterization; Atmospheric measurements; Biomembranes; Dielectric substrates; Helium; Packaging machines; Pressure measurement; Sensor phenomena and characterization; Testing; Thermal conductivity; Wafer scale integration;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Micro Electro Mechanical Systems, 2003. MEMS-03 Kyoto. IEEE The Sixteenth Annual International Conference on

ISSN

1084-6999

Print_ISBN

0-7803-7744-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/MEMSYS.2003.1189797

Filename

1189797