MEMS Pressure Sensor

for a Capacitance to Digital Converter

J.A. Montiel-Nelson (1,*), J. Sosa (1), R. Pulido (1), S. García-Alonso (1)

J.M. Monzón (2), A. Beriain (3), H. Solar (3), R. Berenguer (3)

(1) University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Dept. of Electronic Engineering and
Automatics, Institute for Applied Microelectronics (IUMA).

(2) University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Dept. of Electrical Engineering,

Institute for Applied Microelectronics (IUMA).

(3) CEIT & Tecnun − University of Navarra.

(*) montiel@iuma.ulpgc.es

Keywords: MEMS, CMOS, RFID, low-power sensor, pressure sensor.

Abstract:

In this paper, a digital output MEMS pressure sensor using capacitance-to-time

converter is presented. The MEMS transducer has been designed and fabricated
using MetalMUMPs process from MEMSCAP. For a diaphragm area of 600x600
μm2 and an electrostatic pressure variation up to 30 kPa, the MEMS exhibits a
capacitance change from 9.3 pF to 13.4 pF, with a INL of 0.2%. A capacitance to
digital converter has been designed and fabricated in a low cost 2P4M 0.35μm
CMOS standard process as a digital interface to the MEMS sensor. The measured
resolution of 7.9 bit and power consumption of 16.56 μW demonstrate that by
combining both devices a long range passive RFID sensor for pressure
measurements up to 30 kPa is achieved.

Introduction:

In this work, a combination of a pressure MEMS capacitive sensor and a

capacitance-to-digital converter (CDC) are integrated to be compatible with a RFID
tag for medical and bio-sensing applications. The design of the MEMS capacitive
sensor is focused to provide a high linearity, due to the sensibility of the digital
converter to that parameter. The designed CDC provides high performance in terms
of dynamic range and power consumption. Combining both devices an ultra-low-
power sensor for pressure measurements up to 30 kPa is presented.

RFID Sensor architecture

The digital core controls the communication with the reader using the electronic
product code (EPC) Gen 2 communication protocol [1]. Fig.1 shows a simplified
block diagram of the pressure sensor tag architecture proposed in [2]. It consists of
four main blocks: the analog front-end, the digital core, the MEMS transducer and
the sensor interface. Briefly, the analog front-end is responsible for providing power
Meeting IBERNAM-CMC2. November 20-21, 2014, Naturgas Energía, Bilbao, Spain
supply and clock signal to the rest of the elements of the tag. It also
demodulates//modulates the input/output signals during the communication with the
reader.
The EEPROM included in the digital core stores the sensor ID and additional data
when required (e.g. calibration values of the sensor). The capacitive MEMS translate
pressure into a capacitance value and, finally, the sensor interface converts the
capacitance value of the MEMS to a digital word. Following sections will focus in the
implementation of the pressure sensor block.
Four different sizes of diaphragm were analyzed, designed, fabricated and measured,
in terms of nominal capacitance and linearity. The smallest dimension of the
diaphragm size is 600x600 μm2. The other four types of diaphragm sizes are 2, 3 and
4 times the smallest one, i.e. 1200x1200 μm2, 1800x1800 μm2 and 2400x2400 μm2,
respectively. Fig. 2 shows the fabricated MEMS devices with the four different
diaphragm sizes. For each diaphragm size, several layouts for the etch holes are
implemented. The different etch hole layouts improve not only the removing of
sacrificial layers but also adjust the nominal capacitance. For the sake of simplicity
during measurements setup, we applied a voltage to the parallel plate capacitor, and
therefore, the electrostatic pressure that the charge exerts on the surface of poly
produces a deflection of the complete diaphragm and consequently a variation of the
capacitance.

Acknowledgment

This work was funded by project BATTLEWISE (TEC2011-29148-C02-01 &

TEC2011-29148-C02-02) of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.

Fig. 1. RFID sensor block diagram. Fig. 2. Microphotograph of the fabricated MEMS
capacitive transducers.

REFERENCES
1. EPCTM Radio-Frequency Identity Protocols Class-1, Generation-2 UHF-RFID Protocol for
Communications at 860MHz-960MHz, V1.2.0 ed., October 2008.
2. A. Vaz, H. Solar, I. Rebollo, I. Gutierrez, and R. Berenguer. Long range, low power uhf rfid analog
front-end suitable for batteryless wireless sensors. In Microwave Symposium Digest (MTT), 2010 IEEE
MTT-S International, pages 836 –839, may 2010.

Meeting IBERNAM-CMC2. November 20-21, 2014, Naturgas Energía, Bilbao, Spain