Sensor Packaging Considerations

Cost considerations introduce additional restrictions. Sensor packaging can represent a substantial part of the total fabrication cost, being sometimes several orders of magnitude higher than the cost of the silicon part... 

Savrun, E. (2002) Packaging considerations for very high temperature microsystems. Proceedings, IEEE Sensors 2002, Orlando, FI, 12-14 June 2002, vol. 2, pp. 1139-1143. 

At the same time, many practical issued associated with the use of optical oxygen sensors in food packs still remain. These have to be addressed to adapt the existing sensing materials and prototype systems for real-life applications, achieve the required sensor specifications, operational performance and safety. Considerable technological developments and effort in eliminating current problems and bottlenecks are required, to facilitate widespread use of the oxygen sensors by food and packaging industry. 

Many of these tasks require extensive and multi-disciplinary R D efforts supported by considerable investments, as well as active interaction with potential users (food and packaging industries, food research organizations, and with government institutions). This should be followed by extensive validation of such sensors with real foods and conditions of use. 

In addition to these, there has been considerable amount of research danonstrat-ing the use of NCD thin film in packaging and thermal applications [47]. Active devices, like transistors, have been mounted on diamond carriers thereby improving their performance due to better thermal management. The high thermal conductivity exhibited by thin film diamond has been a positive impact in packaging approaches in the MEMS devices, as well. Furthermore, NCD has been used for many optical applications to fabricate resonators [48], two-dimensional photonic crystals [49], UV transparent electrodes on SiC [50] and in some sensor applications [51],... 

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