An in-plane low-noise accelerometer fabricated with an improved process flow

We present a bulk micromachined in-plane capacitive accelerometer fabricated with an improved process flow, by etching only one-fifth of the wafer thickness at the back of the silicon while forming the bar-structure electrode for the sensing capacitor. The improved flow greatly lowers the footing effect during deep reactive ion etching （DRIE）, and increases the proof mass by 54% compared to the traditional way, resulting in both improved device quality and a higher yield rate. Acceleration in the X direction is sensed capacitively by varying the overlapped area of a differential capacitor pair, which eliminates the nonlinear behavior by fixing the parallel-plate gap. The damping coefficient of the sensing motion is low due to the slide-film damping. A large proof mass is made using DRIE, which also ensures that dimensions of the spring beams in the Y and Z directions can be made large to lower cross axis coupling and increase the pull-in voltage. The theoretical Brownian noise floor is 0.47 μg/Hz^1/2 at room temperature and atmospheric pressure. The tested frequency response of a prototype complies with the low damping design scheme. Output data for input acceleration from -1 g to 1 g are recorded by a digital multimeter and show very good linearity. The tested random bias of the prototype is 130 μg at an averaging time of around 6 s.