New low-cost MEMS capacitive pressure sensor concept

Capacitive pressure sensors based on surface or bulk MEMS technology have many attributes that make them highly desirable for many applications. The biggest technical challenge of capacitive pressure sensor technology is the creation of a reference cavity. It dictates the packaging approach and therefore the cost of the sensor. In this paper we introduce a new design of capacitive pressure sensor that takes advantage of a novel new wafer level packaging technology - A thin-film. sealing technology that allows independent pressure control from high vacuum to high pressure. The new technology seals the vacuum cavity formed by standard surface micro machining technology by a brief melting of a metal layer using a pulsed laser. The ability to form reference vacuum cavity without the need for fusing or bonding with another structure allows the design to be simplified, leading to low cost and high yield.