Intelligent Industrial Measurement Instruments with Silicon Piezoresistive MEMS Pressure Sensors

In this paper we first describe the latest silicon piezoresistive MEMS pressure sensor developed and manufactured at the Center of Microelectronic Technologies (ICTM-CMT). We introduce the concept of intelligent industrial instrumentation, and present a method that enables simultaneous high-performance pressure and temperature measurement to be realized using the described sensor. Experimental verification of the method was performed using the intelligent industrial instrument platform developed at ICTM-CMT. The obtained results have been discussed. They indicate that it is possible to meet or exceeded the measurement performance of existing industrial-grade equipment by using the described approach. An important advantage of the method is that it can enable the temperature measurement capability to be added to some existing intelligent transmitters without hardware modifications. A new intelligent industrial liquid level transmitter, based on the described method and developed at IHTM-CMT, is also presented.