Patent ID: 6850859

Claim:
A drift compensation system for compensating the drift of a sensor within a manufacturing lot, comprising: a sensor test sample manufactured from a lot of material having substantially similar chemical or metallurgical properties; a drift characterization tester, wherein the test sample is exposed to a predetermined thermal environment, and wherein measurements of the test sample output are analyzed to provide a functional relationship between temperature and time associated with the sensor test sample; a drift function describing the relationship between time and temperature derived from the thermal exposure testing of the test sample in the drift characterization tester; a sensor system comprising: a second sensor manufactured from the same lot of material as the sensor test sample; and a memory storage component for storing parameters associated with the drift function of the sensor test sample and the second sensor; a drift compensation instrument coupleable to the second sensor, and operable to retrieve the stored parameters of the drift function from the memory storage component and correct the output of the second sensor based on the drift function; and wherein the sensor test sample is exposed to the predetermined thermal environment in the drift characterization tester to characterize the drift function that is used by the drift compensation instrument to compensate the output drift of the sensors manufactured from the same lot of material.