A Flexible Temperature Sensor Integrated at Needle Tip for In Situ Acupoint Temperature Monitoring.

Temperature can reflect vital activities, and researchers have attempted to guide Chinese medicine diagnosis and treatment by observing acupoint temperature changes. Integrating a temperature sensor at the needle tip enables in situ acupoint temperature measurement. However, the sensor needles for acupoint temperature monitoring designed in previous studies were fabricated by manually soldering thermistor beads and metal wires, making mass production difficult.

Silicon Micromachined TSVs for Backside Interconnection of Ultra-Small Pressure Sensors.

This paper presents an ultra-small absolute pressure sensor with a silicon-micromachined TSV backside interconnection for high-performance, high spatial resolution contact pressure sensing, including flexible-substrate applications. By exploiting silicon-micromachined TSVs that are compatibly fabricated with the pressure sensor, the sensing signals are emitted from the chip backside, thereby eliminating the fragile leads on the front-side. Such a design achieves a flat and fully passivated top surface to protect the sensor from mechanical damage, for reliable direct-contact pressure sensing.

Ultra-Responsive MEMS Sensing Chip for Differential Thermal Analysis (DTA).

Ultra-responsive single-crystal silicon MEMS thermopiles for differential thermal analysis (DTA) are developed. Facilitated by a unique "microholes interetch and sealing (MIS)" technique, pairs of suspended thermopiles are batch fabricated in a differential form, with high-density (54 pairs) n-type/p-type single-crystal silicon thermocouples integrated within each thermopile (sample area ~0.045 mm).