Development of a Bulk-Micromachined Single Crystal Silicon Gyroscope of Wide Operating Range at Atmospheric Pressure

Abstract

In this paper, presented are the design and the fabrication of the novel bulk-micromachined gyroscope with its detection and control circuit. The proposed structure is designed to have good properties such as heavy proof mass, a large movement and high moving velocity of the proof mass at an operating frequency. Despite of an appropriate design of the proof mass and comb electrodes, the high-Q property and the capacitance measurement scheme inevitably bring on nonlinear property and limited bandwidth of the system. Moreover, temperature variation degrades the stability of the performance. In this paper, we adopt a feedback control scheme to achieve a linear output and a less sensitive operation to the temperature variation. Through experiments, it is confirmed that the designed gyroscope and the control circuit achieve performances of wide input range of 1,000 deg/sec and bandwidth of 80 Hz.