A Monolithic Integrated CMOS Thermal Vacuum Sensor

The monolithic integrated micro sensor is an important direction in the fields of integrated circuits and micro sensors. In this paper,a monolithic thermal vacuum sensor based on a micro-hotplate （MHP） and operating under constant bias voltage conditions was designed. A new monolithic integrating mode was proposed,in which the dielectric and passiva- tion layers in standard CMOS processes were used as sensor structure layers,gate polysilicon as the sacrificial layer,and the second polysilicon layer as the sensor heating resistor. Then, the fabricating processes were designed and the monolithic thermal vacuum sensor was fabricated with a 0. 6μm mixed signal CMOS process followed by sacrificial layer etching technology. The measurement results show that the fabricated monolithic vacuum sensor can measure the pressure range of 2- 10^5 Pa and the output voltage is adjustable.

A 1.2 V,3.1%3σ-accuracy thermal sensor analog front-end circuit in 12 nm CMOS process

This paper presents a 1.2 V high accuracy thermal sensor analog front-end circuit with 7 probes placed around the microprocessor chip.This analog front-end consists of a BGR(bandgap reference),a DEM(dynamic element matching)control,and probes.The BGR generates the voltages linear changed with temperature,which are followed by the data read out circuits.The superior accuracy of the BGR’s output voltage is a key factor for sensors fabricated via the FinFET digital process.Here,a 4-stage folded current bias structure is proposed,to increase DC accuracy and confer immunity against FinFET process variation due to limited device length and low current bias.At the same time,DEM is also adopted,so as to filter out current branch mismatches.Having been fabricated via a 12 nm FinFET CMOS process,200 chips were tested.The measurement results demonstrate that these analog front-end circuits can work steadily below 1.2 V,and a less than 3.1%3σ-accuracy level is achieved.Temperature stability is 0.088 mV/℃across a range from-40 to 130℃.

Micro thermal shear stress sensor based on vacuum anodic bonding and bulk-micromachining

This paper describes a micro thermal shear stress sensor with a cavity underneath, based on vacuum anodic bonding and bulk micromachined technology. A Ti/Pt alloy strip, 2μm×100μm, is deposited on the top of a thin silicon nitride diaphragm and functioned as the thermal sensor element. By using vacuum anodic bonding and bulk-si anisotropic wet etching process instead of the sacrificial-layer technique, a cavity, functioned as the adiabatic vacuum chamber, 200μm×200μm×400μm, is placed between the silicon nitride diaphragm and glass （Corning 7740）. This method totally avoid adhesion problem which is a major issue of the sacrificial-layer technique.

Rigid Sensor Allocation and Placement Technique for Reducing the Number of Sensors in Thermal Monitoring

Using embedded thermal sensors, dynamic thermal management(DTM) techniques measure runtime thermal behavior of high-performance microprocessors so as to prevent thermal runaway situations. The number of placed sensors should be minimized, while guaranteeing accurate tracking of hot spots and full thermal characterization. In this paper, we propose a rigid sensor allocation and placement technique for determining the minimal number of thermal sensors and the optimal locations while satisfying an expected accuracy of hot spot temperature error based on dual clustering. We analyze the false alarm rates of hot spots using the proposed methods in noise-free, with noise and sensor calibration scenarios, respectively. Experimental results confirm that our proposed methods are capable of accurately characterizing the temperatures of microprocessors.

Room temperature NO2-sensing properties of hexagonal tungsten oxide nanorods

Hexagonal WO_3 nanorods were synthesized through a facile hydrothermal method. The nanorods properties were investigated by scanning electron microscope（SEM）, transmission electron microscope（TEM）, energy dispersive spectroscopy（EDS）, and x-ray diffraction（XRD）. The NO_2-sensing performances in terms of sensor response, response/recovery times and repeatability at room temperature were optimized by varying the heat treatment temperature of WO_3 nanorods. The optimized NO_2sensor（400-℃-annealed WO_3 nanorods） showed an ultra-high sensor response of 3.2 and short response time of 1 s to 5-ppm NO_2. In addition, the 400-℃-annealed sample exhibited more stable repeatability.Furthermore, dynamic responses measurements of annealed samples showed that all the annealed WO_3 nanorods sensors presented p-type behaviors. We suppose the p-type behavior of the WO_3 nanorods sensor to be that an inversion layer is formed in the space charge layer when the sensor is exposed to NO_2 at room temperature.Therefore, the 400-℃-annealed WO_3 nanorods sensor is one of the most energy conservation candidates to detect NO_2 at room temperature.

Examination of the Quality of GOSAT/CAI Cloud Flag Data over Beijing Using Ground-based Cloud Data

It has been several years since the Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite （GOSAT） began to observe the distribution of CO2 and CH4 over the globe from space. Results from Thermal and Near-infrared Sensor for Carbon Observation-Cloud and Aerosol Imager （TANSO-CAI） cloud screening are necessary for the retrieval of CO2 and CH4 gas concentrations for GOSAT TANSO-Fourier Transform Spectrometer （FTS） observations. In this study, TANSO-CAI cloud flag data were compared with ground-based cloud data collected by an all-sky imager （ASI） over Beijing from June 2009 to May 2012 to examine the data quality. The results showed that the CAI has an obvious cloudy tendency bias over Beijing, especially in winter. The main reason might be that heavy aerosols in the sky are incorrectly determined as cloudy pixels by the CAI algorithm. Results also showed that the CAI algorithm sometimes neglects some high thin cirrus cloud over this area.

Design and Implementation of an Ultrasonic Heat Meter Based on MSP430F437

Flowing with the reform of the hot water heating method in China, heat meter will enter into households in the near future. A portable ultrasonic heat meter is designed in this paper. The meter uses chip microprocessor MSP430F437 as the data process core, and uses ultrasonic flow sensor to measure flow rate of the hot water, and capture input and output temperatures of the hot water using the thermal resistance sensor Ptl000, and then household energy consumption is calculated via temperature difference between input temperature and output temperature of the hot water multiplied by volume of hot water that is calculated though flow rate integration of hot water. In order to test the performance of the proposed heat meter, experiments is carried out. Both the temperature and flow measurement results satisfy the requirements of accuracy and the heat meter is effective in the heat measurement.

Surface Spline Interpolation Method for Thermal Reconstruction with Limited Sensor Data of Non-Uniform Placements

With the characteristic size reducing as well as the power densities exponentially increasing, elevated chip temperatures are true limiters to the performance and reliability of integrated circuits. To address these thermal issues, it is essential to use a set of on-chip thermal sensors to monitor temperatures during operation.These temperature sampling results are then used by thermal management techniques to appropriately manage chip performance. In this paper, we propose a surface spline interpolation method to reconstruct the full thermal characterization of integrated circuits with non-uniform thermal sensor placements. We construct the thermal surface function using the mathematical tool of surface spline with the matrix calculation of the non-uniform sample data. Then, we take the coordinates of the points at grid locations into the surface function to get its temperature value so that we can reconstruct the full thermal signals. To evaluate the effiectiveness of our method,we develop an experiment for reconstructing full thermal status of a 16-core processor. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the inverse distance weighting method based on dynamic Voronoi diagram and spectral analysis techniques both in the average absolute error metric and the hot spot absolute error metric with short enough runtime to meet the real-time process demand. Besides, our method still has the advantages such as its mathematical simplicity with no need of pre-process.

A thermally flexible and multi-site tactile sensor for remote 3D dynamic sensing imaging

A flexible,multi-site tactile and thermal sensor(MTTS)based on polyvinylidene fluoride(resolution 50×50)is reported.It can be used to implement spatial mapping caused by tactile and thermal events and record the two-dimensional motion trajectory of a tracked target object.The output voltage and current signal are recorded as amapping by sensing the external pressure and thermal radiation stimulus,and the response distribution is dynamically observed on the three-dimensional interface.Through the mapping relationship between the established piezoelectric and pyroelectric signals,the piezoelectric component and the pyroelectric component are effectively extracted from the composite signals.The MTTS has a good sensitivity for tactile and thermal detection,and the electrodes have good synchronism.In addition,the signal interference is less than 9.5%and decreases as the pressure decreases after the distance between adjacent sites exceeds 200μm.The integration of MTTS and signal processing units has potential applications in human-machine interaction systems,health status detection and smart assistive devices.

Ceramic thermal wind sensor based on advanced direct chip attaching package

An advanced direct chip attaching packaged two-dimensional ceramic thermal wind sensor is studied. The thermal wind sensor chip is fabricated by metal lift-off processes on the ceramic substrate. An advanced direct chip attaching （DCA） packaging is adopted and this new packaged method simplifies the processes of packaging further. Simulations of the advanced DCA packaged sensor based on computational fluid dynamics （CFD） model show the sensor can detect wind speed and direction effectively. The wind tunnel testing results show the advanced DCA packaged sensor can detect the wind direction from 0° to 360° and wind speed from 0 to 20 m/s with the error less than 0.5 m/s. The nonlinear fitting based least square method in Matlab is used to analyze the performance of the sensor.

Transient thermal response of micro-thermal conductivity detector (μTCD) for the identification of gas mixtures:An ultra-fast and low power method

Micro-thermal conductivity detector(μTCD)gas sensors work by detecting changes in the thermal conductivity of the surrounding medium and are used as detectors in many applications such as gas chromatography systems.Conventional TCDs use steady-state resistance(i.e.,temperature)measurements of a micro-heater.In this work,we developed a new measurement method and hardware configuration based on the processing of the transient response of a low thermal mass TCD to an electric current step.The method was implemented for a 100-μm-long and 1-μm-thick micro-fabricated bridge that consisted of doped polysilicon conductive film passivated with a 200-nm silicon nitride layer.Transient resistance variations of theμTCD in response to a square current pulse were studied in multiple mixtures of dilute gases in nitrogen.Simulations and experimental results are presented and compared for the time resolved and steady-state regime of the sensor response.Thermal analysis and simulation show that the sensor response is exponential in the transient state,that the time constant of this exponential variation was a linear function of the thermal conductivity of the gas ambient,and that the sensor was able to quantify the mixture composition.The level of detection in nitrogen was estimated to be from 25 ppm for helium to 178 ppm for carbon dioxide.With this novel approach,the sensor requires approximately 3.6 nJ for a single measurement and needs only 300μs of sampling time.This is less than the energy and time required for steady-state DC measurements.

System on chip thermal vacuum sensor based on standard CMOS process

An on-chip microelectromechanical system was fabricated in a 0.5μm standard CMOS process for gas pressure detection. The sensor was based on a micro-hotplate （MHP） and had been integrated with a rail to rail operational amplifier and an 8-bit successive approximation register （SAR） A/D converter. A tungsten resistor was manufactured on the MHP as the sensing element, and the sacrificial layer of the sensor was made from polysilicon and etched by surface-micromachining technology. The operational amplifier was configured to make the sensor operate in constant current mode. A digital bit stream was provided as the system output. The measurement results demonstrate that the gas pressure sensitive range of the vacuum sensor extends from 1 to 105 Pa. In the gas pressure range from 1 to 100 Pa, the sensitivity of the sensor is 0.23 mV/Pa, the linearity is 4.95%, and the hysteresis is 8.69%. The operational amplifier can drive 200 Ω resistors distortionlessly, and the SAR A/D converter achieves a resolution of 7.4 bit with 100 kHz sample rate. The performance of the operational amplifier and the SAR A/D converter meets the requirements of the sensor system.

Wearable sensors and supercapacitors using electroplated-Ni/ZnO antibacterial fabric

Herein,nickel nanocones and zinc oxide nanosheets were electroplated onto a fabric to produce multifunctional(wearable,stretchable,washable,hydrophobic,and antibacterial)materials with sensing,heating,and supercapacitive properties.All these functionalities are integrated into a one-layered fabric that can be used as a portable intelligent electronic textile for potential application in healthcare monitoring,smart sportswear,and energy storage.Electroplated nickel enhances the electrical conductivity and thus increases the electron charge transfer for supercapacitor applications.The integration of ZnO with the Ni-plated fabric provides pseudocapacitance via redox reactions with the electrolyte.The resistance of the Ni/ZnO fabric changes in response to external stimuli such as temperature and strain.When voltage is applied,the fabric generates heat through Joule heating,demonstrating its potential application as winter sportswear.The superior mechanical durability of the fabric was confirmed through bending and stretching tests.The hydrophobic surface prevents viruses contained in liquid droplets from infiltrating the fabric.In addition,bacterial growth is inhibited because of the antibacterial properties of the Ni/ZnO fabric and because of Joule heating.The one-layered fabric integrated with such multiple functionalities is expected to be applicable in the development of next-generation portable and wearable electronic textiles in various industries.

Synthesis and Characterization of ZnO Nanowires and ZnO–CuO Nanoflakes from Sputter-Deposited Brass(Cu_(0.65)–Zn_(0.35)) Film and Their Application in Gas Sensing

A novel method was presented for synthesis of ZnO and ZnO-CuO composites in the form of nanowires, nanorods and nanoflakes on oxidized silicon substrates. Further, the use of the synthesized nanostructures for gas sensing was demonstrated. Pure brass （Cu0.65-Zn0.35） films were deposited on oxidized Si substrate by radio frequency （RF） diode sputtering. Subsequently, these films having thickness in the range of 100-200 nm were oxidized in different oxidizing ambient in the temperature range of 300-550 ℃. The effect of temperature, time and oxidizing ambient on the growth of nanostructures was investigated by scanning electron microscopy （SEM）, transmission electron microscopy （TEM）, X-ray diffraction （XRD） and photoluminescence （PL） techniques. The nanostructures surface was analyzed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy （XPS）. The synthesized nanowires had diameter in the range of 60-100 nm and length up to 50 μm. Based on these observations, the growth mechanism has been suggested. For the nanorods, the diameter was observed to be -150 nm. Samples having dense nanowires, nanorods and nanoflakes were used as a gas sensing material. The performance Of the sensor was investigated for different nanostructured materials for various volatile organic compounds （VOCs）, It was observed that ZnO- CuO nanoflakes were more sensitive to VOC sensing compared to ZnO nanowires and nanorods.