Fused Silica Gyroscope Resonator Manufactured With Femtosecond Laser Assisted Wet Etching

Abstract

As the development of inertial navigation technology, an increasing number of application scenarios have required improved gyroscope accuracy. Fused silica offers high quality factor and thermal stability compared with single crystal silicon. Developing microelectromechanical system (MEMS) gyroscopes based on planarized wafer-level fused silica processing technology is a developing trend. However, high quality fused silica processing is much more difficult than silicon processing, such as acid etching, dry etching or laser cutting. This letter reports the research performed on the rapid and high-quality fabrication of the fused silica resonator with femtosecond laser modification assisted chemical etching (FLMCE) method. <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$300~\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> thickness fused silica resonator could be manufactured in 60 mins with right angle and nanoscale surface roughness. Testing results indicate that the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -factor of the fabricated resonators reaches 814 k, which offers great potential in MEMS gyroscopes. [2021-0238]