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Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

We present successful experimental results from the first lateral capacitive accelerometer to be designed and manufactured in a conventional CMOS process. Compatibility with conventional CMOS provides advantages of low cost, high yield and fast prototyping that should be transferable to any CMOS foundry. A fully differential capacitive-bridge interface which cannot be realized in polysilicon technology is designed and implemented. Out-of-plane curling associated with the composite structural layers is compensated to first order through a curl matching technique. The prototype accelerometer has a measured sensitivity of 1.2 mV/g and a 0.5 mg//spl radic/Hz noise floor at the output of the sensing element.

Notes

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Microelectromechanical Systems Laboratory

Text Reference

G. Zhang, Huikai Xie, L.E. de Rosset, and Gary Fedder, "A lateral capacitive CMOS accelerometer with structural curl compensation," Proceedings of The 12th IEEE International Conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS '99), January, 1999, pp. 606 - 611.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Xie_1999_3640,
   author = "G. Zhang and Huikai Xie and L.E. de Rosset and Gary Fedder",
   title = "A lateral capacitive CMOS accelerometer with structural curl compensation",
   booktitle = "Proceedings of The 12th IEEE International Conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS '99)",
   pages = "606 - 611",
   month = "January",
   year = "1999",
}

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