High Precision Measurement of Pressure with Novel Miniaturized Quartz Oscillation Vacuum Gauge

A novel type of miniaturized quartz oscillation vacuum gauge was developed to precisely measure the rarefied gas pressure in wide range and small volume.The quartz oscillation vacuum gauge comprises a quartz crystal oscillator, STM32 single-chip microprocessor and circuits of self-oscillation, signal isolation, differential amplification, conversion and data acquisition.The impact of the pressure-difference on the oscillation impedance explains the mechanism of the quartz oscillation vacuum gauge.The test results show that the newly-developed quartz vacuum gauge outperforms the conventional ones, including but not limited to the resistance, liquid, capacitance and heat conduction vacuum gauges, not only because of higher precision, wider range, smaller size and better stability but also because it is capable of accurately evaluating the pressure changing in wide range of the rarefied gas confined in small volume, such as a pressure sensor enclosed in a MEMS package.