Research Projects

We have successfully designed, fabricated, packaged and tested five different MEMS pressure sensors (1.2 Bar Absolute Pressure; 600 mBar, 10 Bar, 200 Bar and 400 Bar Gauge Pressure; and 150 mBar, 600 mBar Differential Pressure; see Fig. 1 for example), and even qualified some of them for aerospace applications. The qualified sensors have been successfully used by HAL in their helicopters in test flights. The ToT for these sensors has also been done to BEL and to i2n Technologies Pvt. Ltd. (an IISc start up). We are now proposing to design and fabricate a miniaturized integrated MEMS system within 2mm X 2mm X 2mm size suitable for several applications such as mobile phones, wearables, asset management, indoor tracking, drone navigation etc. The proposed work involves design, fabrication, packaging and testing of miniaturized MEMS system with three sub-modules mounted on a FR4 or a ceramic substrate. The two chips to be developed are as follows : 1. High sensitive Barometric sensor : This sensor is an absolute sensor with a buried vacuum cavity as reference. The sensitivity of the device is designed such that it can accurately measure the altitude variations at a range of 10-12 cms. It should be integratable to one of the commonly used commercial ASIC for easy manufacturing. A temperature sensor be part of the device to help in sensing and temperature compensation. 2. Energy harvester : It’s a micro-scale device harvesting the vibration energy available in the ambient environment. It powers the sense die and the ASIC and communicate the data to the outside world. The scope also includes demonstrating the integration of sensor, ASIC and the energy harvesting device in a single package. This also involves the development of necessary test set-ups and calibration algorithms to achieve the required accuracy.