A T-Shape Aluminum Nitride Thin-Film Piezoelectric MEMS Resonant Accelerometer

In this paper, we report a novel aluminum nitride (AlN) resonant micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) accelerometer. The spring beams are T-shaped with two masses hanged at the end. This accelerometer is sensitive to the z-axis acceleration due to a thin thickness. Different from the working mechanism of the ordinary MEMS resonant accelerometers, masses of this accelerometer are excited to resonate in-plane. In addition the stiffness of spring beams changes significantly when an out plane (z-axis) inertial force applied on the structure. Therefore, the resonant frequency of the structure will change with the out-plane inertial force. The resonant properties and sensitivities of this AlN accelerometer are simulated by COMSOL Multiphysics. The accelerometer is fabricated and tested. The size of the whole structure is 464 × 650 μm
²
. The resonant frequency is 16.10925 kHz at the static state. The sensing-axis sensitivity of this accelerometer is 1.11 Hz/g (i.e., 68.9 ppm/g) tested from -5g to +5g. The linearity of the accelerometer is 0.9954. The cross-axis sensitivities are 0.053 Hz/g (x-axis) and 0.048 Hz/g (y-axis) respectively. The temperature coefficient of frequency (TCF) of this accelerometer is 0.815 Hz/ °C (i.e., 50.6 ppm/°C), tested from 0 °C to 50 °C.