CMOS integrated tactile sensor array by porous Si bulk micromachining

An integrated 8 × 8 element 3D force sensor array was developed for tactile sensing. The 300 × 300 μm2 sensors are formed from mono-crystalline silicon membranes with spacing of 700 μm. The signals of the individual transducers are read out line-by-line via an on-chip CMOS decoder. The porous silicon bulk micromachining was implemented as one of the final steps of the n-well CMOS compatible processing.