A Miniature Quartz Vibrating Beam Accelerometer

This paper reports a miniature quartz vibrating beam accelerometer (MQVBA) with the range of 10g, which is expected to be used for inclination and seismic measurements. The design of MQVBA is carefully optimized to focus on the challenge of high accuracy and robustness in harsh environment. The bandwidth of MQVBA can be controlled by adjusting squeeze film air damping in order to meet different needs of inclinometer and seismic ground sensor. Wafer-scale batch MEMS processing and hybrid integration techniques are adopted to fabricate MQVBA. The prototype of MQVBA achieves the bias instability of 0.6μg@41s and the nonlinearity of lower than 0.01% in ±1g input range while showing remarkable endurance in the environment of random vibration up to 2 kHz frequency range.