Study of the fabrication of a silicon pressure sensor

Because automation technology is developing so rapidly, pressure sensors in industry become more and more important. The pressure sensors have been widely used in the industrial, automobile and biomedical instrumentation. This paper focuses on the fabrication and characterization of a highly sensitive silicon pressure sensor. In this experiment the parameters influencing the characteristics of sensors are discussed, which include diaphragm thickness, piezoresistor layout, junction depth and environment temperature. Based on the experimental results, highly sensitive silicon pressure sensors can be fabricated under the conditions that the diaphragm is thinner, the junction depth is shallower on a (100) n-type Si substrate and the p-type piezoresistors are along the (110) direction.