A High-Resolution Accelerometer With Electrostatic Damping and Improved Supply Sensitivity

In this paper, a charge-balancing accelerometer is presented. A hybrid interface topology is utilised to achieve high resolution, high linearity and low power supply sensitivity. The accelerometer consists of a micromechanical sensor element, a self-balancing bridge (SBB) open-loop readout, AC force feedback and ΔΣ ADC. The SBB converts acceleration to ratiometric voltage. The ratiometric output of the SBB is converted to the digital domain by the ADC. In order to achieve high resolution, a micromechanical sensor element with a high quality factor, Q, is utilised. The AC force feedback is used for damping the high Q to get a low settling time. The sensor interface is fabricated in a standard 0.35 μm CMOS process. The fabricated chip has an area of 6.66 mm² and consumes 1 mA at a nominal supply voltage of 3.6 V. The sensor has a maximum DC nonlinearity of 1.3% over the commercial temperature range with an input range of ±1.15 g. The noise floor of the sensor is around 2 μg/√{Hz} and the signal bandwidth is 200 Hz. The bias instability is 13 μ g and the sensor gain variation is less than 5% in the 3-3.6 V supply range.