A micro-machined Pirani gauge for vacuum measurement of ultra-small sized vacuum packaging

Quite a few MEMS devices need vacuum packaging technology to guarantee the desirable performance. Developing an absolute vacuum environment for those devices is indispensable. However, it is difficult to monitor the pressure change in vacuum chamber in on-line and real-time mode. A surface micro-machined Pirani gauge for measuring vacuum pressure inside vacuum packaging in wafer level was presented in this paper. It was designed with a simplified structure and did not need complex circuit. Only a simple Wheatstone bridge circuit is needed, which could be manufactured by conventional CMOS processes. Preliminary tests on this device were conducted. The experimental results show that the Pirani gauge is capable of measuring pressures from atmospheric value to 1 Pa and has a very good linearity in the range from1 Pa to 300 Pa. It demonstrates that the micro-machined Pirani gauge has great potential to be used in wafer level vacuum packaging. Also, the Pirani gauge is able to be the packaging hermeticity detector.