Stress free quad beam optical silicon accelerometer

An optical accelerometer is presented in this paper. The working principle is based on the variation of the output light intensity versus the acceleration. The variation is due to the misalignment of ARROW waveguides defined on the accelerometer mass and frame. The accelerometer consists of a quad beam structure with four lateral beams to increase the sensitivity. The technology for the fabrication of the mechanical structures is based on BESOI wafers combining bulk and surface micromachining. Numerical simulations by FEM have been done to optimize the devices. The devices have been tested dynamically and statically. The design, simulation, fabrication and preliminary results are presented.