Manufacturing of Multisensor Microinstrumentation Clusters

This Small Business Innovative Research Phase I Project seeks to develop low-cost manufacturing techniques (particularly assembly and packaging) for the implementation of multi-sensor microinstrumentation clusters. In addition, a cost evaluation will be performed in order to reduce the cost of such microclusters to about $600. Microinstrumentation clusters are becoming increasingly important in a number of application areas and are needed to measure many environmental parameters, such as pressure, temperature, acceleration and vibration, humidity, and gas concentration. These clusters should be very small, stand-alone, wireless, and capable of being deployed easily in the environment of interest. Although much effort has gone into the development of the individual components of such clusters, including the interface and signal processing integrated circuit chips, and solid-state sensors and actuators that have increasingly been reduced in size using silicon micromachining techniques, very little hasbeen done to address the critical questions of how these complex systems can be packaged and assembled in a practical, low-cost, and high-volume manner. This project aims at developing such techniques and at eventual manufacturing of multi-sensor instrumentation systems. Anticipated Military Benefits/Potential Commercial Applications of the Research or Development: There exist many defense applications for these miniature clusters, such as miniature weather monitoring stations, drifting buoys, and wearable soldier monitoring systems, as well as commercial applications, such as distributed data gathering systems, tracking of corporate deliverables ("assets") on a global scale, personal health monitors, embedded sensing clusters for controlling sophisticated manufacturing/processing equipment, and automotive systems.