A novel sandwich capacitive accelerometer with a symmetrical structure fabricated from a D-SOI wafer

This paper presents a novel sandwich capacitance accelerometer with a symmetrical double-sided beam-mass structure. The symmetrical beam-mass structure is fabricated from a double-device-layer silicon-on-insulate (D-SOI) wafer. The proof mass is suspended by eight beams at the corners on both sides. The beams are fabricated at the device layers of the SOI wafer; the cross-section of the beams is a standard trapezoid. The thickness of the beams can be well controlled because it is determined by the thickness of the device layer in the SOI wafer, and there is no dry etching process in the accelerometer fabrication. The resonance frequency of the developed accelerometer is measured in an open-loop system by a network analyzer. The quality factor and the resonant frequency are 18 and 812 Hz, respectively. The accelerometer has an opened-loop capacitance sensitivity of 8.7 pF g⁻¹, a closed-loop sensitivity of 1.39 V g⁻¹ and a nonlinearity of 0.49% over the range of 1 g. The measured input, referred to as the noise floor of the accelerometers, with an interface circuit is 2.4 µg (√Hz)⁻¹ (0–100 Hz). (paper)