Development of seismic sensor application using micro electromechanical systems

The development of MEMS accelerometer application as seismic sensor is discussed in this paper. The system consists of a sensor signal conditioning, microcontroller circuits, and application programs for data acquisition system. Two capacitive type sensors are used in the system. With the most recent technology of MEMS, it is possible to construct an integrated seismometer using only one chip of MEMS sensor, which traditionally three separated sensors must be employed. From the experiment using calibrating signal, it is shown that the the sensitivity of the system could be increased by the factor of two.