IC-Integrated Flexible Shear-Stress Sensor Skin

Abstract

This paper reports the first IC-integrated flexible shear-stress sensor skin. By integrating both bias and signal-conditioning circuitry on-chip, the wiring of the MEMS skin is significantly simplified and reliability is improved. The circuit is first made by a commercial IC foundry (i.e., Mitel) and micromachining is done on the CMOS wafers to form the skins. We further demonstrated the use of the sensor skin by packaging it on a semi-cylindrical aluminum block and tested it in a wind tunnel. In our experiment, the skin has successfully identified both the flow separation and stagnation points. It is believed that the ICintegrated smart skin technology demonstrated here can be applied to many other interesting applications in biomedicine, wearable microsystems, robotics and so on.