An electrostatically actuated micromachined vibrating ring gyroscope with highly symmetric support beams

This paper reports the design, fabrication, package and tests of a highly symmetric micro-machined vibrating ring gyroscope (MVRG). The ring is electrostatically driven, capacitively sensed and stiffness controlled for resonant frequency balancing by 16 electrode anchors inside the ring. A new method is proposed to fabricate the vibrating ring gyroscope through simple all-silicon high aspect ratio microfabrication technologies with only 2 masks. The test results show that the frequency split of the gyroscope can be adjusted from 160 Hz before balancing to less than 0.1 Hz after balancing, the Q-factor could achieve 22000 in vacuum, the resolution of the gyroscope is 0.05°/s, and the measured non-linearity is 0.06% in the ±50°/s range.