A Compensation Method for the Temperature Offset Drift on the Semiconductor Piezoresistive Sensors

Abstract

This paper describes a new compensation method for the temperature offset drift on the semiconductor piezoresistive sensors such as pressure sensor and accelerometer.
The offset drift compensation was conventionally carried out with the method in which a parallel resistor is inserted into a part of the piezoresistive gages. This method, however, has a disadvantage in that the second-order errors dependent both on the second-order coefficient of piezoresistors and that of the original offset drift remain.
We used a new temperature compensation circuit including a temperature sensitive voltage supply and a compensation resistor, with which both the first-order and the second-order temperature offset drift could be completely canceled, achieving about 1/30 reduction of the offset temperature error, compared with the conventional method.