A lateral-axis tuning fork gyroscope with combined sensing capacitors and decoupled comb drive

In this paper, a bulk micro machined lateral-axis TFG (tuning fork gyroscope) with improved architecture and combined mechanism sensing capacitors is reported. The combined sensing capacitors make the TFG have high sensitivity and good linearity even under wide input range and fabrication imperfection. Moreover, the decoupled comb drive, together with the improved architecture, can efficiently decouple the mode coupling. At atmospheric pressure, the TFG has a sensitivity of 0.1126mV/°/s even with unity gain. The nonlinearity is 0.7% with an input range of up to 1000°/s.