New low-cost concept for characterization of MEMS accelerometers at medium-g levels for automotive

Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) accelerometers are widely used in the automotive and aeronautics fields and are becoming extremely popular in a wide range of consumer electronics products. The cost of testing is a major one within the manufacturing process, because MEMS accelerometer characterization requires a series of tests that include physical stimuli. The calibration and the functional testing are the most challenging and a wide selection of Automatic Test Equipments (ATEs) is available on the market for this purpose; those equipments provide a full characterization of the Device Under Test (DUT), from low-g to high-g levels, even over temperature. This paper presents a novel solution that experiments an innovative procedure to perform a characterization at medium-g levels. The presented approach can be applied to low-cost ATEs obtaining challenging results. The procedure is deeply investigated and an experimental setup is described. Finally, a case study is analysed: some already trimmed Three Degrees of Freedom (3DoF)-Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) modules (three-axes accelerometer integrated with a mixed signal ASIC), from SensorDynamics AG are tested with the experimental setup and analysed, for the first time, at medium-g levels.