A novel temperature-compensating structure for micromechanical bridge resonator

Abstract

A novel temperature-compensating structure for micromechanical bridge resonators has been developed in this paper. The temperature drift of resonance frequency is compensated by the output voltage of a Si/SiO2 bilayer cantilever temperature sensor, which is integrated in the same chip with the bridge resonator. The mechanism of this kind of temperature sensor resembles that of commercial bimetallic temperature sensors. The deformation of the cantilever measured by a Wheatstone bridge located at the clamped end changes with temperature due to the different thermal expansion coefficients of silicon and silicon dioxide. Both the bridge and the cantilever are of the same thickness and are fabricated simultaneously with the same materials and by an identical process flow. So there are few errors caused by the temperature difference between the temperature sensor and the resonator itself, which occurs during fast temperature changes.