Design and calibration of sidewall piezoresistive force sensor

Some existing problems about gripping force in the micromanipulation were summarized. An effective fabricating sidewall piezoresistor in plane technique was proposed and successfully used to fabricate piezoresistor force sensor in a MEMS microgripper. A closed-loop control of micro-operation was achieved for the detection of the feedback gripping force. The ion implantation technique combined with the deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) technology was used to fabricate the sidewall sensor. The compatibility of the vertical sidewall surface piezoresistor technique with other micromachining techniques was improved. At last, an electronic scale and a precision voltage meter were used to calibrate the piezorisistive sensor. The experimental results verify that the sensitivity of the fabricated displacement sensors is better than 72 V/N, and the displacement resolution is better than 3 μN.