An area-variant type MEMS capacitive sensor based on a novel bionic swallow structure for high sensitive nano-indentation measurement

•An area-variant type MEMS capacitive force sensor with high sensitivity, resolution, measurement range, and linearity was proposed in this work.•A novel bionic swallow structure with multiple differential comb arrays was proposed to achieve a great balance between high sensitivity and compact chip size.•A novel differential comb sensing configuration was proposed for eliminating electrostatic interferences and geometry asymmetry resulting from the increasing comb number.•The fabricated sensor has been characterized with a robotic microscopy system, its measuring sensitivity was 98.54 aF/nN for a high measurement range of 142 µN with high linearity better than 0.9996.