Physical Sensors & Devices

Research that includes:

  • Silicon MEMS actuators: comb, electro-thermal, and plastic deformation
  • Precision electronic sensing and measurements of capacitive, frequency, and coulombic MEMS variables
  • Structures and architectures for gyroscopes, accelerometers, micro strain gauges for direct application to rigid structures e.g., steel, and levitated MEMS

Qiutong Jin

Graduate Student Researcher
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
Professor Clark T.-C. Nguyen (Advisor)
Ph.D. 2025

Qiutong Jin received B.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of Iowa in 2019. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in MEMS in EECS at UC Berkeley under the supervision of Prof. Clark Nguyen.

Fall 2023 Research Review Presenter


BPN999: Wearable Sweat Sensors with High-Throughput Fabrication

Noelle Davis
Seung-Rok Kim
Yullim Lee
Nicole Qing
2024

We have been developing sweat sensors to analyze physiological and metabolic health information, such as sweat rate, glucose levels, pH, and various electrolytes, from any surface on the body surface where sweat glands are present. However, the stiff sweat sensors developed so far struggle to detect subtle signal changes, especially on soft skin. This is due to a mechanical mismatch between the rigid sweat sensor and the pliable skin, which can lead to motion artifacts and delamination of the patch from skin. Specifically, the stiff sensor cannot easily stretch along with the...

BPNX1024: Reusable Sweat Rate Sensor

Seung-Rok Kim
Yifei Zhan
Noelle Davis
Suhrith Bellamkonda
2024

Sweat rate can provide the precautious signal of hyperhidrosis, hypohidrosis, and autonomic dysfunction. Currently, microfluidic and hygrometer-based sweat rate sensors are two types of available real-time sweat rate sensors. However, microfluidic device has issues of low temporal resolution, limited volume capacity, and surrounding artifact dependencies, while hygrometer-based devices also has overfilling and environmental artifact issues. In this work, we present reusable sweat rate sensor for continuous monitoring of sweat rate with novel sensor design.

Project...

BPN941: Ultrasound-Induced Haptic Interface

Fan Xia
Wei Yue
2024

The next big thing, AR/VR, requires an immersive Human Machine Interface (HMI) in addition to visual and sound stimuli. Although skin is the biggest organ in the human body, very few efforts compared to visual and auditory senses have been done to develop a “sense of touch”. The mechanical stimulus to generate the touch sense by the embedded mechanoreceptors in the skin at different depths has been created in many ways as vibratory actuators, microneedles, etc. In this project, we are investigating to create haptic interface via radiation force generated by piezoelectric...

BPNX1027: Electronic-Photonic Ultrasound Receiver Array for Endoscopic Applications (New Project)

Sarika Madhvapathy
Ali M. Niknejad
Vladimir Stojanović
Jun-Chau Chien
2024

Endoscopic ultrasound imaging systems require compact, low-power probes with a dense array of sensing elements. At the same time, the cabling inside the probe tube that interfaces with the external processing unit should be minimal. State-of-the-art ultrasound imagers that utilize CMUTs and PMUTs require integrating each transducer’s power-hungry analog frontend on probe, making it more difficult to satisfy the safe power limit. To address this, we propose the use of silicon microring resonators (MRRs) as ultrasound sensors. Their small element size (10-20 µm in diameter) allows us to...

BPNX1022: Multiplexed Gas Sensors

Carla Bassil
2024

Gas sensing has long been an area of academic and industrial interest. However, state of the art sensors still lack selectivity and sensitivity when it comes to differentiating gases of similar compositions. In this work, we explore methods to create multiplexed gas sensors that can differentiate these mixtures with high accuracy and long-term stability.

Project is currently funded by: Federal

Victor Couedel

Graduate Student Researcher
Mechanical Engineering
Professor Rayne Zheng (Advisor)
Ph.D. 2026 (Anticipated)

Mechanical Engineering Ph.D Student in Dr. Xiaoyu 'Rayne' Zheng's Additive Manufacturing and Metamaterials laboratory.
Interested in new additive manufacturing processes and printable materials.

Currently working on 3D printing of piezoelectric architected ceramics for underwater acoustic applications.

Dehui Zhang

Postdoctoral Researcher
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
Professor Ali Javey (Advisor)

Dehui Zhang is a postdoctoral researcher in Electrical Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center (BSAC), and a research affiliate in the Materials Science Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He received a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2021, and was a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Los Angeles in 2021-2023. Dehui Zhang joined Javey Research Group in September 2023...

BPN991: Autolabeling for Large-Scale Detection Datasets

Philip L. Jacobson
2024

3D perception is an essential task for autonomous driving, and thus building the most accurate, computationally efficient, fast, and label efficient models is of great interest. In particular, label-efficient 3D detection is attractive as manual labeling of 3D LiDAR point clouds is both costly and time-consuming. Autolabeling is a machine learning paradigm in which a model is trained on a (small) set of labeled data before being used to generate predictions, known as pseudo-labels, on a large set of unlabeled data which can then be used to train an accurate downstream model with only a...

BPN956: Time-of-Flight Hardware for the Solar Probe ANalyzer for Ions (SPAN-Ion)

Omar Alkendi
Lydia Lee
2023

Monitoring and building our understanding of space weather is necessary to protect current and future astronauts and hardware, as well as further our understanding of its effects on atmospheric development and loss. This project has developed two radiation-hardened sensor frontends to measure the ion composition of the solar wind aboard the Solar Probe ANalyzer for Ions (SPAN-Ion). SPAN-Ion uses time-of-flight mass spectrometry to distinguish ions by their mass: charge ratios; the target architecture for future missions decreases mass and increases speed in exchange for several orders of...