Hybrid Smart Temperature Compensation System for Piezoresistive 3D Stress Sensors

This paper proposes a new hybrid temperature compensation system for doped silicon-based piezoresistive 3D stress sensors. The developed compensation system integrates a temperature sensor, placed in close proximity to the stress sensing rosettes, with the artificial neural networks (ANNs). In this work, the n-type circular piezoresistor featured over (111) silicon plane was employed to capture the local temperature variations, within the sensing chip. The extracted temperature changes, along with the resistance changes, are fed, as inputs, to the ANNs to compensate the temperature effect on the acquired signals for more accurate stress measurement. The proposed compensation system was experimentally evaluated while extracting stress applied up to 60 MPa at different temperatures within a range from 0 °C to 50 °C. The developed system was successfully able reduce the maximum full scale error, obtained from using only a temperature sensor for compensation, by ~55%. The new system has merit since it has the capability to compensate for both resistance and sensitivity, for 3D stress sensor, with no need for additional circuitry. Moreover the employed temperature sensor shares the same thermal environment with the stress sensing rosette.