• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
• /
• 2001.06c
• /
• pp.53-58
• /
• 2001

This paper presents a high resolution capacitive microaccelerometer for applications to personal information systems. We reduce the mechanical noise level of the microaccelerometer by increasing the proof-mass based on deep RIE process. We reduce the electrical noise level by increasing the amplitude of an AC sense voltage. The high sense voltage is obtained by DC-to-DC voltage multiplier. In order to solve the nonlinearity problem caused by the high sense voltage, we modify the conventional comb electrode of straight finger type into that of branched finger type, resulting in self force-balancing effects for enhanced detection linearity. The proposed branched finger capacitive microaccelerometer was fabricated by the deep RIE process of an SOI wafer. The fabricated microaccelerometer reduces the electrical noise at the level of $2.4{\mu}g/\sqrt{Hz}$ for the sense voltage of l6.5V, which is 10.1 times smaller than the electrical noise level of $24.3{\mu}g/\sqrt{Hz}$ at 0.9V. For the sense voltage higher than 2V, the electrical noise level of the microaccelerometer became smaller than the constant mechanical noise level of $11{\mu}g/\sqrt{Hz}$. Total noise level, including the electrical noise and the mechanical noise, has been measured as $9{\mu}g/\sqrt{Hz}$ for the sense voltage of 16.5V, which is 3.2 times smaller than the total noise of $28.6{\mu}g/\sqrt{Hz}$ for the sense voltage of 0.9V. The self force-balancing effect results in the increased stiffness of 1.98 N/m at the sense voltage of 17.8V, compared to the stiffness of 1.35 N/m at 0V, thereby generating the additional stiffness at the rate of $0.002N/m/V^{2}$.