Miniaturized Planar Sensor Development

This paper describes the process of developing a miniature device with planar sensors utilizing electrical capacitance measurement. The project investigates the feasibility and characterization of a miniaturized planar sensor integrated on a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) chamber. A 16-planar-electrodes array, with each dimension of the electrode, 4 mm × 2 mm (length × width) was fabricated using a printed circuit board (PCB) technology due to its low cost advantage. The measurement chamber for the sensing area was fabricated using PDMS. The PDMS chamber was bonded on the PCB with a semi cured PDMS to create a round sensing area for sample loading. The mould to develop the PDMS chamber was designed using AutoCAD 2010 and was fabricated using a 3D printer. Capacitance measurement of the planar electrodes was carried out using water as the sample and was validated using a theoretical calculation.  Experimental result shows that the distance of the measured electrodes is inversely proportional to the capacitance value. The range of the measured capacitances of the measurement varies from 10 pF to 20 pF. The result shows that the planar sensors are able to provide capacitance measurement within the miniaturized platform where the measured capacitance showed good agreement with the theoretical calculation.