Design and Modeling of a MEMS-based Accelerometer with Pull in Analysis

Download or read book Design and Modeling of a MEMS-based Accelerometer with Pull in Analysis written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis reports the design and modelling of a MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical system) based inertial accelerometer. The main motivation to design a differential type of accelerometer is that such a kind of structure allows differential electrostatic actuation and capacitive sensing. They can be operated at the border of stability also so that the "pull in" operation mode can be explored. Such kinds of structures have a wide range of applications because of their high sensitivity. One is in the field of minimally invasive surgery where accelerometers will be combined with gyroscopes to be used in the navigation of surgical tools as a inertial micro unit (IMU). The choice for the design of a structure with 1 Degree ofFreedom(DOF), instead of a 2-DOF device was instigated by the simplicity of the design and by a more efficient 1-DOF dynamic model. The accelerometers were designed and optimized using the MATLAB simulator and COVENTORWARE simulation tool. First set of devices is fabricated using a commercial foundry process called SOIMUMPs. The simulation tests show that the SOl accelerometer system yields 8.8kHz resonant frequency, with a quality factor of 10 and 2.l2mV/g sensitivity. To characterize the accelerometer a new semi automatic tool was formulated for the noise analysis and noise based optimization of the accelerometer design and the analysis estimation shows that there is a trade off between the SIN ratio and the sensitivity and for the given design could be made much better in terms of SIN by tuning its resonant frequency.