A novel electrostatic-driven tuning fork micromachined gyroscope with a bar structure operating at atmospheric pressure

Abstract

A novel electrostatic-driven tuning fork micromachined gyroscope with a bar structure is presented. The gyroscope is fabricated by silicon–glass bonding and deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) technology. The gyroscope's driving and sensing proof masses consist of many movable bars. As the motion of the movable proof masses is parallel to the plane of fixed driving and sensing electrodes on a glass substrate, there is mainly slide film damping in the driving and sensing directions, which enables it to achieve high-quality factors and vacuum-free packaging. The gyroscope can operate at atmospheric pressure by electrostatic driving and capacitive sensing. The performances of the gyroscope are tested and the results show that the resonant frequencies and the quality factors for driving and sensing modes are 2.873 kHz and 2.989 kHz, 804 and 789 at atmospheric pressure, respectively. The scale factor and nonlinearity of the gyroscope are 17.45 mV/°/s and 0.43%, respectively.