Development of silicon microforce sensors integrated with double meander springs for standard hardness test instruments

摘要

Silicon microforce sensors, to be used as a transferable standard for micro force and depth scale calibrations of hardness testing instruments, are developed using silicon bulk micromachining technologies. Instead of wet chemical etching, inductively coupled plasma (ICP) cryogenic deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) is employed in the sensor fabrication process leading to more precise control of 300 μm deep structures with smooth sidewall profiles. Double meander springs are designed flanking to the boss replacing the conventional rectangular springs and thereby improving the system linearity. Two full p-SOI piezoresistive Wheatstone bridges are added on both clamped ends of the active sensors. To realize passive force sensors two spring-mass elements are stacked using glue and photoresist as joining materials. Correspondingly, although plastic deformation seems to occur when the second spring is contacted, the kink effect (i.e., abrupt increase of stiffness) is obviously observed from the first test of the passive stack sensor.