Modeling and analysis of temperature effect on MEMS gyroscope

Abstract

It is well known that temperature variation affects a MEMS device's performance. In this paper, the effect of temperature on the whole MEMS based gyroscope is observed by recording and analysis the zero rate output (ZRO). The effect of temperature on the ZRO comes from material parameter changing and electronic parameter changing. With temperature changing, the ZRO of the gyroscope suffers from changes of stiffness coefficient of beams, the damping ratio and other parameters [1]. A matlab Simulink model is built to research how much influence the material parameter has on the ZRO. The simulation result shows that material parameter changing induced effects have influence on the ZRO for 0.2% in the range of around room temperature. Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) is an important part of a gyroscope. As most ASICs are made by semiconductors like silicon, the features of ASIC components (like output voltage, gain factors and resistance of doped silicon) are temperature sensitive by nature. A model based on a simplified ASIC component of capacitance to voltage converter circuit (C/V circuit) with temperature sensitive parasitic resistances is built to explore how much influence the electronic parameter has on the ZRO. The simulation result shows that electronic parameter changing induced effects have influence on the ZRO for less than 3ppm in temperature range from 273 K to 318 K. The experiment is conducted by exposing a MEMS gyroscope into a thermal chamber, and the temperature range is from 273 K to 318 K. The experiment result indicates the temperature fluctuation has influence of about 5% on ZRO when the reference is the ZRO at 300 K. Material parameter changing induced effect has the greatest impact on ZRO, and that effect needs to be compensated to improve the ZRO stability of a MEMS gyroscope.