A T-Shape Aluminum Nitride Thin-Film Piezoelectric MEMS Resonant Accelerometer

Abstract

In this paper, we report a novel aluminum nitride (AlN) resonant micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) accelerometer. The spring beams are T-shaped with two masses hanged at the end. This accelerometer is sensitive to the $z$ -axis acceleration due to a thin thickness. Different from the working mechanism of the ordinary MEMS resonant accelerometers, masses of this accelerometer are excited to resonate in-plane. In addition the stiffness of spring beams changes significantly when an out plane ( $z$ -axis) inertial force applied on the structure. Therefore, the resonant frequency of the structure will change with the out-plane inertial force. The resonant properties and sensitivities of this AlN accelerometer are simulated by COMSOL Multiphysics. The accelerometer is fabricated and tested. The size of the whole structure is $464\times 650\,\,\mu \text{m}^{2}$ . The resonant frequency is 16.10925 kHz at the static state. The sensing-axis sensitivity of this accelerometer is 1.11 Hz/g (i.e., 68.9 ppm/g) tested from −5g to +5g. The linearity of the accelerometer is 0.9954. The cross-axis sensitivities are 0.053 Hz/g ( $x$ -axis) and 0.048 Hz/g ( $y$ -axis) respectively. The temperature coefficient of frequency (TCF) of this accelerometer is 0.815 Hz/ °C (i.e., 50.6 ppm/°C), tested from 0 °C to 50 °C. [2019-0062]