PiezoMUMPs microsensor for contactless measurements of DC-electrical current

This paper presents an integrated sensor able to perform contactless measurements of DC-Electrical currents. The microsensor conceived has been designed by using the PiezoMUMPs technology which includes a piezoelectric layer and therefore allows for implementing a mechano-electric transduction principle able to convert the DC-Electrical current into a voltage signal without the adoption of specific polarization signals or integrated inductors/coils. Even if some papers have been published on this topic, the development and the experimental characterization of the MEMS prototype in PiezoMUMPs technology presented in this work is relevant for its characteristics of being simple, small, low cost and self-generating. The MEMS sensor prototype has been designed, fabricated and characterized and the results reported here demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach and encourage to spend further efforts to optimize the device design in order to improve overall performances.