Technical Paper
Micro- and Nano-Technologies for Automotive Sensor Research
2007-04-16
2007-01-1012
Current and future research directions for micro- and nano-technologies applicable to the automotive sensor market are presented. Micro- and nano- based sensors are inherently small with high bandwidth and incredible sensitivity potential and can therefore used to measure the desired data directly (eg. force from road on wheel at wheel bearing) rather than inferring data by indirect measurement and data table lookup. The key to leveraging the capabilities of micro- and nano-systems is to control the interface between the microsystem and vehicle component, and/or the nanoscale device and the microscale packaging. The former interface is primarily responsible for device performance and the latter for processing and integration cost. To demonstrate these points, a number of micro- and nano-sensors, currently in development, are described and reviewed.