Optimal design and nonlinearities in a z-axis resonant accelerometer

Author

Comi, C. ; Corigliano, A. ; Zega, V. ; Zerbini, S.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Civil & Environ. Eng., Politec. di Milano, Milan, Italy

fYear

2015

fDate

19-22 April 2015

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

6

Abstract

Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) accelerometers are micro-sized devices largely used for detecting accelerations in the consumer and automotive market. Both capacitive and resonant sensing have been successfully employed in these devices. In the present work, we focus on a z-axis resonant accelerometer recently proposed in [1] fabricated by the Thelma© surface-micromachining technique developed by STMicroelectronics. After a full non-linear dynamic study, an optimization of the design of the device is carried out. The main goal of the optimization process is to increase the sensitivity of the device together with the reliability and the linearity.

Keywords

acceleration measurement; accelerometers; capacitive sensors; micromachining; microsensors; reliability; STMicroelectronics; Thelma© surface micromachining technique; acceleration detection; automotive market; capacitive sensing; consumer market; device design optimization; microelectromechanical system; microsized device; nonlinear dynamic; nonlinearities; reliability; resonant sensing; z-axis resonant accelerometer; Accelerometers; Springs;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Thermal, Mechanical and Multi-Physics Simulation and Experiments in Microelectronics and Microsystems (EuroSimE), 2015 16th International Conference on

Conference_Location

Budapest

Print_ISBN

978-1-4799-9949-1

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/EuroSimE.2015.7103145

Filename

7103145