A high precision SOI MEMS-CMOS ±4g piezoresistive accelerometer

Abstract

System development and characterization of a low noise low offset SOI MEMS-CMOS PCB-integrated multi-chip ±4g piezoresistive accelerometer sensor comprising a coupled multi-bandwidth variable-gain amplifier block and a thermal sensitivity and offset compensation block is presented in this work. Custom design and fabrication has been carried out for both the SOI MEMS sensor and the analog front-end for high precision and operational reliability. The system is shown to have a scale factor of ∼4 mV/g and an output nonlinearity <1% of full-scale output with a cross-axis sensitivity <1%. Cyclic loading experiments exhibit distortionless operation over ∼1000,000 cycles without failure indicative of an extremely robust system. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.