General Electric Company

Hyon-Jin Kwon

Stanley Chu

Lowell Scott Smith

Glenn Scott Claydon

David Martin Mills

Warren Lee

Wei-Cheng Tian

Kenneth Wayne Rigby

Sisira Kankanam Gamage

Ye-Ming Li

Jie Sun

Sam Yie-Sum Wong

A pressure sensor includes a base substrate silicon fusion bonded to a cap substrate with a chamber disposed between the base substrate and the cap substrate. Each of the base substrate and the cap substrate include silicon. The base substrate includes walls defining a cavity and a diaphragm portion positioned over the cavity, wherein the cavity is open to an environment to be sensed. The chamber is hermetically sealed from the environment.

Pressure sensors and methods of making the same

A device comprising an array of sensors and a multiplicity of bus lines, each sensor being electrically connected to a respective bus line and comprising a respective multiplicity of groups of micromachined sensor cells, the sensor cell groups of a particular sensor being electrically coupled to each other via the bus line to which that sensor is connected, each sensor cell group comprising a respective multiplicity of micromachined sensor cells that are electrically interconnected to each other and not switchably disconnectable from each other, the device further comprising means for isolating any one of the sensor cell groups from its associated bus line and in response to any one of the micromachined sensor cells of that sensor cell group being short-circuited to ground. In one implementation, the isolating means comprise a multiplicity of fuses. In another implementation, the isolating means comprise a multiplicity of short circuit protection modules, each module comprising a current sensor circuit and an electrical isolation switch.

Isolation of short-circuited sensor cells for high-reliability operation of sensor array

Growing community of inventors

Fremont, CA, United States of America

Hyon-Jin Kwon