Performance enhancement of piezoelectric bulk mode MEMS mode-matched gyroscopes based on a secondary phase feedback loop

Abstract

This work investigates the performance enhancement of piezoelectric bulk mode mode-matched gyroscopes based on a secondary phase feedback loop. An independent phase feedback loop realized by a lock-in amplifier is applied on a 10 MHz multiple ports piezoelectric device to harness its effective stiffness and damping factor for better gyroscope performance. The multiple ports device is designed based on support transducer topology with eight transducer arms, some of which drive the central resonant tank into a secondary elliptical mode. Open-loop measurement with varied phase delay is adopted to carry out the best working condition (i.e. higher Q-factor, smaller frequency split). Therefore, the measured scale factor results in a 1.56 times improvement through boosting the Q-factor of the driving mode. The minimum frequency split compensated by the phase feedback could reach 13.4 ppm with a tuning phase of 60° and tuning voltage of 0.1 V. The bias instability of the proposed gyro through the help of phase feedback loop could be reduced by 2.13 times. The achievement in this work has shown that the phase feedback mechanism could indeed help to improve the performance of the resonant transducers.