| The steadily growing needs for clinic diagnosis, imaging, structure evaluation, and underwater detection have promoted the development of low-cost, highly sensitive piezoelectric polymer sensors. Today, piezoelectric polymer sensors are among the fastest growing of the technologies within the {dollar}18 billion worldwide sensor market. On the other hand, the tremendous growth of IC industry has also propelled the research and development of integrated polymer sensors in diverse applications.; In this thesis, two types of integrated PVDF-TrFE based acoustic sensors, integrated PVDF-TrFE based acoustic sensor and integrated on-chip PVDF-TrFE based CMOS acoustic sensor are developed. For the first type of device, the PVDF-TrFE film are prepared on silicon wafer and then integrated with interfacial circuit on the PCB board level. Charge amplifier is employed in the signal conditioning circuit in order to amplify the PVDF-TrFE electrical signal and minimize the parasitic capacitance of PVDF-TrFE film and connecting wires. As the basic structure for charge and voltage amplifier, differential amplifier is introduced and explained in detail. When connected with piezoelectric polymer sensor, it effectively amplifies the electrical signal corresponding to the physical input while rejects the noise due to the environmental changes. The final device is encapsulated by Rho-C rubber for underwater measurement. Device characterization shows that the device sensitivity ranges from -169 dB to -172 dB over the testing frequencies.; For on-chip integrated PVDF-TrFE based CMOS acoustic sensor, the PVDF-TrFE film and interfacial circuits are integrated on silicon chip level. The signal conditioning circuits are designed to distribute along the edge of a 2mm by 2.5mm silicon die. All of their inputs are connected to a large metal pad located in the middle of the silicon die, which is the interface to PVDF-TrFE film. The CMOS interfacial circuit is designed based on MOSIS AMIS 0.5 technology and a standard mix-signal circuit design procedure is followed. The layout design and circuit simulation are provided in detail. Additionally, the sample preparation for PVDF-TrFE film and its integration techniques with silicon wafer are presented.; The advantages of using PVDF-TrFE film as transducers are also analyzed. The comparison of PVDF-TrFE and PVDF are made based on Mason equivalent circuit model. |
