Design and fabrication of corrosion and humidity sensors for performance evaluation of chip scale hermetic packages for biomedical implantable devices

In this paper we report on the development of a set of test chips that can be used to verify the sealing techniques with biomedical implants as their target application. These test chips have been designed and fabricated based on the Tyndall's in-house CMOS 1.5 micron technology. Each chip includes humidity, temperature and/or corrosion sensors. Different designs and sizes have been considered for these sensors to compare the sensors sensitivity and to select the optimum ones for the final chip. The sensors are being tested and the results obtained for two of the humidity sensors are presented.