Time-based micro-g accelerometer with improved damper geometry

Dias, Rosana A.; Rocha, Licinio; Mol, L.; Wolffenbuttel, R.F.; Cretu, Edmond

doi:10.1109/imtc.2010.5488163

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 8 publications

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“…An alternative solution to reduce the damping while maintaining the capacitance area, or to increase the capacitance without increasing the damper, consists on the implementation of air pockets [15]. Such air pockets provide pathways to facilitate airflow and reduce squeeze-film damping.…”

Section: Damper Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design of a Time-Based Micro-g Accelerometer

et al. 2011

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Closed-loop pull-in time operated devices are a good alternative for high sensitivity accelerometers. This paper proposes the use of time measurement as the transduction mechanism for the realization of a high-precision accelerometer. The key feature is the existence of a metastable region that dominates pull-in behavior, thus making pull-in time very sensitive to external accelerations. The main design challenges for a pull-in time parallel-plate capacitive microelectromechanical system (MEMS) accelerometer are related to the damping and the associated tradeoff between sensitivity and noise is discussed. Parallel-plate MEMS structures designed and fabricated in a 25 m-thick SOI micromachining process (SOIMUMPS) are used to demonstrate the accelerometer time-based approach and experimental results demonstrate a sensitivity of 0.25 s/ g. Index Terms-g accelerometer, squeeze-film damping, pull-in time, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) design, microsystems.

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Section: Damper Designmentioning

confidence: 99%