50mv/Bar Sensitivity; Piezoresistive MEMS Altimeter Design for The Agricultural Drones

Abstract

The technology innovations and adoptions outbreaks in the field of agriculture for the ease of forming and productivity improvement. Particularly, drones usage in this sector is very necessary for several activities like spraying pesticides and monitoring the crop growth all over the farm without human intervention. Earlier, the rules of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Sheldon the use of drones for the form fields. Now, the FAA liberalized their guidelines in order to encourage the technology to be part of the farming. Usually, drones should be operated at a specific altitude and thedrones flying above 130m from the ground level having security and privacy concerns. Hence, in order measure altitude of the drone, Micro electro mechanical systems (MEMS) based Altimetry pressure sensors usually preferred in the drone, but in order to decrease the payload of the drone, a miniaturized MEMS based altimetry pressure sensor with high figure of merit design are highly need. In this paper, an attempt is made to design an Edge Centric Polycrystalline Piezoresistive MEMS(ECPP-MEMS) pressure sensor of 1000µm x 1000µm square structure, 1µm membrane thickness and X shaped strain gauge to achieve the sensitivity of 50mV/bar. This model should support to measure the pressure at low altitude ( < 50m above sea level) in the pressure range of 0.1-1 bar at ambient temperature.