A Reconfigurable Hardware Emulator of MEMS Gyroscopes with Built-in Error Source Models

The paper presents a hardware emulator of MEMS vibratory gyroscopes that can be used for accelerating the characterization and verification of control electronics, by decoupling these tasks from the MEMS design and fabrication cycles. The hardware emulator is synthesized on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). In addition to modeling the Coriolis effect, the emulator also models typical error sources in MEMS gyroscopes, namely quadrature error, Duffing non-linearity, thermomechanical noise etc. Preliminary results based on a prototype with user-controllable device parameters synthesized on a Xilinx Zynq-7000 FPGA (Digilent Zybo Z7) are presented in this paper.