3-Axis gyroscope with Si nanogage piezo-resistive detection

Abstract

We present a completely new concept of miniaturized gyroscopes based on Si nanowire piezo-resistive detection. This concept enables to realize extremely compact single-chip 3D gyroscopes while maintaining high performances: performances for consumer applications are obtained with a size of the mechanical part of 0.5 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> /axis, which is 2 to 4 times smaller than state of the art gyroscopes. Moreover the extremely high sensitivity obtained with this concept enables to implement designs with high frequency mismatch between drive and sense mechanical modes, which implies high linear range in open-loop detection, large bandwidth, lower sensitivity to technological variations and low resolution dependency on sense quality factor. We present more precisely first results obtained for Z gyroscopes which have resolution below 0.05°/s/√Hz.