Breakthrough in high performance inertial navigation grade Sigma-Delta MEMS accelerometer

In this paper, we report a Sigma-Delta MEMS navigation grade accelerometer, which, to our knowledge, is the first reported MEMS accelerometer to reach navigation grade performances. This reported system encompasses a high stability and high shock resistance mechanical MEMS sensor, a 5^th-order sigma-delta closed-loop electronic with digital loop filtering and high stability voltage reference. Reported performances for a full scale range of 15g, with shock survivability up to 4000g, are a 10 μg bias stability under warm-up, a bias temperature slope below 200 μg/°C, a scale factor temperature slope below 100 ppm/°C, 2^nd order non-linearity below 20 μg/g² up to 1 kHz and a white noise floor below 2 μg/√NHz. The reported performances make this accelerometer of the same class as the traditional macro electro-mechanical quartz accelerometer.