The Design and Analysis of Piezoresistive Shuriken-Structured Diaphragm Micro-Pressure Sensors

This paper presented a novel 0–3 kPa piezoresistive pressure sensor with high sensitivity and linearity. A shuriken-structured diaphragm (SSD) is designed for the first time to solve the conflict between the sensitivity and linearity for piezoresistive pressure sensors. A trade-off between the stress on the diaphragm edge and the deflection of the diaphragm was achieved by this SSD design according to the numerical simulation. The effects of the glass substrate and the passivation films on the sensing performance were also studied numerically and experimentally. The experimental results indicated the present pressure sensor had a sensitivity of 4.72 mV/kPa/V and a linearity of 0.18 %FSO (full scale output) in the pressure range of 0–3 kPa, which were 28.3% and 50% better than the previous works. [2016-0101]