Design and development of a MEMS capacitive bending strain sensor

The design, modeling, fabrication and testing of a MEMS-based capacitive bending strain sensor utilizing a comb drive is presented. This sensor is designed to be integrated with a telemetry system that will monitor changes in bending strain to assist with the diagnosis of spinal fusion. ABAQUS/CAE finite-element analysis (FEA) software was used to predict sensor actuation, capacitance output and avoid material failure. Highly doped boron silicon wafers with a low resistivity were fabricated into an interdigitated finger array employing deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) to create 150 ?m sidewalls with 25 ?m spacing between the adjacent fingers. The sensor was adhered to a steel beam and subjected to four-point bending to mechanically change the spacing between the interdigitated fingers as a function of strain. As expected, the capacitance output increased as an inverse function of the spacing between the interdigitated fingers. At the unstrained state, the capacitive output was 7.56 pF and increased inversely to 17.04 pF at 1571 ?? of bending strain. The FEA and analytical models were comparable with the largest differential of 0.65 pF or 6.33% occurring at 1000 ??. Advantages of this design are a dice-free process without the use of expensive silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers.