Design, damping estimation and experimental characterization of decoupled 3-DoF robust MEMS gyroscope

This paper reports the design implementation of three degree-of-freedom (3-DoF) non-resonant MEMS gyroscope having 2-DoF drive-mode oscillator. The proposed architecture utilizes structurally decoupled active-passive mass configuration to achieve dynamic amplification of oscillation in 2-DoF drive-mode. This results in higher sensitivity and eliminates the need of mode matching for resonance. A low cost standard Metal-Multi User MEMS Processes (MetalMUMPs) is used to fabricate 20 μm thick nickel based gyroscope with an overall reduced size of 2.2 mm × 2.6 mm. The experimental characterization demonstrated that the frequency response of the 2-DoF drive-mode oscillator has two resonant peaks at 754 Hz and 2.170 kHz with a flat operational region of 1.4 kHz between the peaks. The sense-mode resonant frequency lies at 1.868 kHz within this flat operational region where gain is less sensitive to structural parameters and environmental variations. This results in improved robustness to fabrication imperfections and environmental variations and long term stability without utilizing tuning and feedback control. Gyroscope dynamics and system level simulations using behavioral modeling are carried out to predict the performance of the device. Experimental results show close agreement with the behavioral simulation results due to incorporation of improved damping models in behavioral model developed in CoventorWare.