Introducing industrial-grade MEMS sensors to the seismic industry

Abstract

The scale and complexity of seismic acquisition systems have increased by orders of magnitude over the last 30 years. Efficiency and economy of operation is facilitated by the evolution of miniature, high-reliability electronics, but conventional seismic sensors have now become a limiting factor in new system design. The solution is to utilize silicon wafer processing technology to manufacture a new generation of seismic sensors. Although geophones built on microelectro-mechanical system (MEMS) technology have been used for more than a decade, a new effort was needed to develop a generation of highly integrated 3C accelerometers that could meet the combined requirements of cost, size, power, and reliability. Aimed at utilizing proven MEMS technology, a novel electronics solution was developed to achieve uncompromised performance with small, low-cost sensor elements. The architecture embeds the sensor in a force-feedback loop that suppresses all effects of resonances and tolerance variations in the sensor elements. A fully integrated digital 3C sensor is built by combining one application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and three MEMS elements in a lightweight multichip module. Small size and low power consumption permit the use of 20,000 three-axis sensors in a single marine seismic streamer. This MEMS geophone has been in commercial use since 2012, and we have never had to replace a streamer section due to MEMS-related problems.