ABSTRACT

The growing market for MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical System) application demands cost effective, low power accelerometer with high sensitivity and high resolution. Micromachined accelerometers based on piezoresistive or capacitive are not suitable as inertial sensors for measuring micro gravity especially in space application. In space, due to small inertial force the displacement is not enough for appreciable change in resistance or capacitance. Therefore, in this work an attempt has been made to develop an accelerometer based on the principle of electron tunneling. Since the tunneling current is exponentially related to the displacement of the tunneling tip attached with moving mass, this accelerometer consummates high resolution and especially high dynamic range. Apart from increasing the dynamic range, the actuation voltage is reduced by optimizing the design parameters so that the final device can be integrated with the CMOS circuits. Different types of tunneling accelerometers including cantilever beam, folded beam, crab-leg beam and quad beam based devices are designed, fabricated and tested. A performance comparison has also been made. Further closed loop controller is built with different discrete level components including microcontroller for a specific configuration of the tunneling device to make it functional at constant gap resulting constant current mode of operation.

Keywords: MEMS, Tunneling Accelerometer, Cantilever beam, Folded beam, Crab-leg beam, Quad beam