Fast product cycles are required today. Hence, a high efficiency and reliability of the development process has to be achieved. State-of-the-art design cycles for micromachined accelerometers are quite long due to the complexity of the product: The realization requires a good matching of applied silicon technology, readout electronics, and packaging. Thus, time duration from functional specification to first prototypes can be a quite long dry spell leading frequently to an overrun of the cost budget. In order to improve the development process a design flow is required which allows a fast and efficient optimization of design and technology for a given specification. This paper presents a practical approach to coordinate specification, design and technological process steps and presents the necessary measurement steps to analyze first prototypes. The development process is illustrated at the example of a micromachined accelerometer for automobile measurement tasks. Application-specific needs require an ultra small overall package (< 4x4x2 mm3) and a high sensor performance regarding cross axis sensitivity (< 1%), non-linearity (+/- 0.3 %), temperature drift (< 0.04 %/deg C), and shock survival (> 5000 g). Two approaches, capacitive and piezoresistive have been considered to fulfil the application-specific needs. Due to the fact that the capacitive approach would require an ASIC and hence seems to be more cost and time consuming, a piezoresistive concept was realized.
Rapid process of development for automotive micromachined accelerometers
Kurzer Entwicklungsprozess mikrogefertigter Beschleunigungssensoren für die Kraftfahrzeugelektronik
Sensor, International Conference, 13 ; 353-357
2007
5 Seiten, 6 Bilder, 4 Quellen
Conference paper
English
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