Design, fabrication and characterization of a high performance MEMS accelerometer

High performance accelerometers have wide variety of applications in inertial navigation, seismic imaging, and conditional health monitoring. This paper reports mechanical design, fabrication, and characterization of an in-plane MEMS accelerometer. The sensor has been designed in such a way to meet both the high sensitivity and the wide bandwidth requirements in one single device. The MEMS sensor, which is an interdigitated capacitive accelerometer, is fabricated from a 100 um thick SOI wafer using deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) process. Theoretical results were confirmed by experimental measurements. Sensor has a resonance frequency at 2.3 KHz. Voltage sensitivity of the device is 11.8mV/g. The mechanical-thermal noise of the device is 193ng/rtHz. These characteristics make the device a promising candidate for applications where both the high sensitivity and the wide bandwidth are required.