A BE-SOI MEMS for Inertial Measurement in Geophysical Applications

In this paper, an inertial transducer developed in bulk and etch silicon-on-insulator microelectromechanical-system technology is presented. The device is suitable for low-frequency observation and could represent an interesting solution to implement low-cost monitoring systems for applications requiring a large number of monitoring sites and disposable devices. In particular, the sensor design and the technology adopted are presented here along with models describing the device operation. In addition, an experimental sensor prototype is proposed, and experimental results confirming the suitability of the proposed architecture and its consistence with the predicted behavior are discussed.