Inertial Micro Sensors

The insights gained during the theoretical and experimental investigation of micro structures, and especially their rich dynamics, along with the exploration of new actuation and sensing principles, serve as a basis for the implementation of these approaches in applications.  The development of new concepts in general, and of inertial sensors (micro gyros and accelerometers) in particular, is essentially based on the results of more fundamental theoretical and experimental research.   One of the difficulties in the development of these kind of instruments is their high sensitivity to geometrical imperfections emerging during the fabrication process. For this reason, an ability to tune the sensors properties at the post fabrication stage is of primary importance. While most of the resonant inertial sensors exploit “mechanical” resonance of the structures dictated solely by the geometry, our research is focused on electrostatically tunable nonlinear devices. We recently suggested a new architecture of the tuning electrodes, which allows to combine the advantages of highly tunable bistable devices with low thermal sensitivity and robustness of simple cantilever type devices, which demonstrated theoretically and experimentally the feasibility of the suggested methodology, and allowed estimation of the  sensors possible performance. Additional effort was devoted to the development of new force amplification mechanisms, with the application to resonant accelerometers.