Sensors operating in extreme environments are currently a focal point of global research. Extreme environmental conditions, such as overload, vibration, corrosion, high pressure, high temperature, and radiation, can affect the performance of sensors to the point of failure. It is noteworthy that, compared to the resistance to overload and vibration achieved through structural design, the application of sensors under high-temperature and radiation extreme conditions poses a greater challenge. Silicon carbide (SiC) material, due to its excellent physical and chemical properties, such as a large band gap and high atomic critical displacement energy, demonstrates outstanding potential for application in high-temperature and radiation extreme environments. This review presents the current status and research progress of SiC sensors in high-temperature and radiation extreme environments. Finally, given the limited research on the radiation resistance of SiC sensors, it identifies several challenges and research deficiencies in the application of SiC sensors under radiation extreme environments and discusses the future development direction of SiC-based substrate sensors.

A quartz resonant pressure sensor for ultra-high pressure measurement has been designed and verified. The pressure conversion unit of the sensor is composed of a pressure cylinder and a flexible lever, which can accurately and efficiently meet the role of converting and passing the ultra-high pressure to the resonant unit. The resonant unit of the sensor uses quartz DETF resonators and forms a differential output structure to meets the requirements of high precision and stability. The theory of the overall sensor design scheme is consistent with the simulation results, which verifies the feasibility of the design scheme. The experimental results show that in the pressure range of 120 Mpa, the sensitivity of the ultra-high pressure sensor is 27.3 Hz/Mpa, the linearity reaches 0.0112%, and the total accuracy is 0.0365%. The sensor can be used for high-precision and high-stability detection of ultra-high pressure, which is necessary in special fields such as deep-sea exploration.

This paper describes the design, fabrication, and testing of an integrated packaged sensor that is composed of a micro resonant accelerometer and a temperature sensor. The resonant accelerometer with differential configuration consists of double quartz resonators and a silicon substrate. When acceleration is applied along the sensing axis, the inertial force induced by the proof mass will transfer force to the resonators, which causes an opposite frequency shift of the dual quartz resonators. The loaded acceleration can be measured through detecting the differential frequency shift. The symmetric differential configuration response to spurious effects of thermal loading and inelastic effect causing prestress in the resonators is similar, which can be reduced by detecting the differential frequency, effectively. However, during the manufacture and packaging process, the otherness of residual stress in two quartz resonators results in that the response of resonators to temperature variation is not strictly the same. In other words, this temperature drift cannot be eliminated by the structure design. Thus, a temperature sensor and an accelerometer were packaged in a shell together. These novel integrated sensors can measure acceleration and temperature simultaneously. With the testing temperature data, a novel temperature compensation that is a combination of the variable coefficient regression and least squares support vector machine is used for improving the performance of the accelerometer. By means of this compensation and field programmable gate array, a real-time and online compensation is achieved. The tumble testing results indicate that the sensitivity of the accelerometer is ∼16.97 Hz/g. With the temperature compensation, the output drift of the scale factor is improved by 0.605 Hz/g in the full temperature range, which is from 0.072 Hz/g to 0.015 Hz/g. The drift of zero bias is improved from 345 mg to 1.9 mg.

A quartz resonant pressure sensor is proposed for high-precision measurement of ultra-high pressure. The resonant unit realizes a push–pull differential layout, which restrains the common-mode interference factor, and the resonator is only subject to axial force. The pressure conversion unit is made in an integrated manner, avoiding output drift problems caused by residual stress and small gaps during assembly, welding, and other processes in sensor preparation. Theoretical and simulation analysis was conducted on the overall design scheme of the sensor in this paper, verifying the feasibility. Sensor prototypes were created and performance experiments were conducted. The experimental results show that the sensitivity of the ultra-high pressure sensor is 46.32 Hz/MPa at room temperature within the pressure range of 120 MPa, and the comprehensive accuracy is 0.0266%. The comprehensive accuracy of the sensor is better than 0.0288% FS in the full temperature range environment. This proves that the sensor scheme is suitable for high-precision and high-stability detection of ultra-high pressure, providing new solutions in special pressure measurement fields such as deep-sea and oil exploration.

Graves’ disease, the production of thyroid-stimulating hormone receptor-stimulating antibodies leading to hyperthyroidism, is one of the most common forms of human autoimmune disease. It is widely agreed that complex diseases are not controlled simply by an individual gene or DNA variation but by their combination. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which are the most common form of DNA variation, have great potential as a medical diagnostic tool. In this paper, the P-value is used as a SNP pre-selection criterion, and a wrapper algorithm with binary particle swarm optimization is used to find the rule for discriminating between affected and control subjects. We analyzed the association between combinations of SNPs and Graves’ disease by investigating 108 SNPs in 384 cases and 652 controls. We evaluated our method by differentiating between cases and controls in a five-fold cross validation test, and it achieved a 72.9% prediction accuracy with a combination of 17 SNPs. The experimental results showed that SNPs, even those with a high P-value, have a greater effect on Graves’ disease when acting in a combination.

A high sensitivity quartz resonant pressure sensor with differential output and self-correction is proposed. Although compared to other resonant devices, quartz resonators have less influence on external environmental factors due to their own high quality factor Q; the influence of external environment such as temperature, vibration, and humidity cannot be ignored in high-precision applications. These errors need to be eliminated or compensated. Therefore, this paper divides the core unit of the sensor into two parts: the working unit and the reference unit. The working unit provides the differential outputs which not only improves the sensitivity but also suppresses some interference such as time drift and temperature drift, and it is rarely used in quartz resonant pressure sensors. The reference unit can effectively detect and offset the interference of temperature and vibration which is named as self-correction, and it can also provide temperature measurement. Double-ended tuning fork quartz resonators used in both units are manufactured by micromachining technology. Bellows and flexible mechanisms used as pressure conversion units are manufactured using modern mechanical technology. The test results show that the sensor has the conformity accuracy of the fitting formula of 0.0148% full scale (FS), the good basic accuracy of 0.06% FS, and the high sensitivity of 36.58 Hz/kPa which meets well with the theoretical result. It is shown by the experiments that the reference unit can effectively correct the interference of temperature and vibration. The theoretical analysis and experimental results prove the feasibility of the resonant pressure sensor which can meet the application requirements of pressure measurement in the high-tech industries.