Manipulation of heat flux paths in thermo-elastically damped resonators for Q optimization

We demonstrate how to identify regions of major thermo-elastic dissipation (TED) in MEMS resonators and reduce this energy loss by modifying the device geometry. To demonstrate this, various geometries of a disk resonating gyroscope (DRG) are used. Devices are fabricated and tested to show that the TED-limited quality factor (Q) can indeed be increased using geometric manipulation, as predicted by simulation.