High-sensitive MEMS Fabry-Perot pressure sensor employing an internal-external cavity Vernier effect

In this paper, a high sensitivity pressure sensor employing an internal-external cavity Vernier effect is innovatively achieved with the microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) Fabry-Perot (FP) interferometer. The sensor consists of silicon cavity, vacuum cavity, and silicon-vacuum hybrid cavity, which is fabricated by direct bonding a silicon diaphragm with an etched cylindrical cavity and a silicon substrate. By rationally designing the optical lengths of the silicon cavity and silicon-vacuum hybrid cavity to match, the internal-external cavity Vernier effect will be generated. The proposed cascaded MEMS FP structure exhibits a pressure sensitivity of -1.028 nm/kPa by tracking the envelope evolution of the reflection spectrum, which is 58 times that of the silicon-vacuum hybrid cavity. What’s more, it owns a minimal temperature sensitivity of 0.041 nm/°C for the envelope spectrum. The MEMS FP sensor based on internal-external cavity Vernier effect as the promising candidate provides an essential guideline for high sensitivity pressure measurement under the characteristic of short FP sensing cavity length, which demonstrates the value to the research community.