Fully front-side bulk-micromachined single-chip micro flow sensors for bare-chip SMT (surface mounting technology) packaging.

This paper reports novel single-wafer-based piezoresistive micro flow sensors, which are bulk micromachined only from the front side of the silicon wafer to facilitate the sensor-bare chips directly packaged into micro-fluidic systems with low-cost surface mounting technology (SMT). With neither double-sided micromachining nor multiwafer bonding needed, two structural types of the piezoresistive flow sensors are designed and fabricated in (1 1 1) wafers, where 'type A' sensor has a smaller channel cross section area compared to 'type B' sensor. After the bare sensor chip directly attached on a printed circuit board (PCB), wire bonded between the pads and the PCB for electric interconnection and the inlet/outlet front side connected, deionized water is flowed into the both types of flow sensors to characterize piezoresistive output of the differential pressure sensing elements in terms of the flow rate. For 'type A' and 'type B' sensors that are both power supplied with DC 5 V, the sensitivities are sequentially measured as 766.80 mV (µL s-1)-1 and 19.12 mV (µL s-1)-1, with the nonlinearities as 0.4% FS and 0.9% FS, respectively. Compared with traditionally fabricated micro flow sensors, the single-chip fabricated differential-pressure flow sensors can be low-cost volume manufactured. Moreover, the bare sensor chips can be simply SMT packaged for low-cost micro-system applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]