New pressure sensor for medical, automotive and industrial applications

MEMSIC has announced the launch of its MDP200 bi-directional differential pressure sensor for CPAP, breath detection, room pressure, damper control, flow hood, fume hood, filter monitoring and other applications where ultra-low differential pressure performance is required. Leveraging its highly successful thermal accelerometer technology and experience in consumer electronics, the company will be offering a high-performance differential pressure sensor for medical, HVAC and other applications where competitively priced, highly reliable and ultra-low pressure performance is required. The new pressure sensor is based upon their highly advanced and successful MEMS thermal accelerometer platform, with hundreds of millions of units successfully shipped into a diverse variety of real world automotive and consumer applications. This ultra-sensitive MEMs thermal technology enables the new device to detect minute changes in flow induced by differential pressure. The suspended bridge microstructure inside the device allows it to reliably detect pressure changes from a range of 0.016 Pascal to 500 Pascal. “No diaphragm type sensor can achieve this level of performance,” says Ohlan Silpachai, flow product manager at MEMSIC. “We compared our MDP200 against a class leading competitor differential pressure sensor with a 0 to 0.1 inch water column (25 Pascal) output range. In this head to head test, Memsic’s MDP200 demonstrated a superior signal to noise ratio at signal levels below 1 Pa, while offering a full scale range of 20x higher (MDP200 is calibrated at +/-500 Pa). The integrated electronics within the sensor chip allows a 16 bit digital I2C output at an update rate of less than 7 ms.”