A 0.1 G-to-20 G integrated MEMS inertial sensor

Abstract

This paper presents a novel integrated MEMS inertial sensor with a wide range of acceleration from 0.1 G to 20 G (G = 9.8 m/s2) and with a design suitable for CMOS integration. Owing to the high-density of post-processed gold and the multi-metal layer technology, we have implemented different types of single-axis MEMS capacitive inertial sensors on a single chip of 4 × 4 mm2 in area to obtain a wide sensing range. The estimated Brownian noise was between 82.4 nG/Hz1/2 and 1.11 µG/Hz1/2. The experimental results show that the MEMS sensor has higher sensing resolution than those of conventional MEMS accelerometers.