New piezo-tunneling strain sensor with very low temperature sensitivity

In this paper we present a new silicon piezo-tunneling strain sensor having a very low temperature dependence of the sensitivity. The new sensor is based on a lateral backward diode with a prevailing band-to-band tunneling current in its reverse-bias characteristic. At the operating bias, the temperature dependence of the tunneling current is shown to be small and of opposite sign to that of conventional piezoresistors. Furthermore, the change of sensitivity due to temperature is more than one order of magnitude lower than that of conventional piezoresistors, which makes the sensor almost temperature independent.