A gyroscope fabrication method for high sensitivity and robustness to fabrication tolerances

Abstract

MEMS gyroscopes have favorable characteristics, including small size, high throughput, and low cost. The performance of MEMS gyroscopes depends on the displacement sensitivity of the capacitors. In this paper, we describe the fabrication of 300-mu m-thick gyroscopes that can provide high displacement sensitivity and are robust to fabrication tolerances, i.e. deep reactive ion etch (DRIE) rate uniformity. When thick structures are perforated using DRIE to achieve high-aspect-ratio features, footing is commonly observed. However, we describe a fabrication method that circumvents problems associated with footing and side-wall etching, so that the gyroscopes can have uniform dimensions and small variations across the wafer. Using a post-fabrication translation approach, the position of capacitors is modified following DRIE, and the gap in the gyroscopes can be reduced to 3 mu m, which leads to an aspect ratio of 100. Using this method, we fabricated MEMS gyroscopes that can overcome the DRIE aspect ratio limit and have capacitors with higher sensitivities than those of other gyroscopes, which typically employ substrates that are less than 100 mu m thick. The gyroscope had a resonant frequency of 9.91 kHz, a quality factor of 2500 and a sensitivity of 23 mV/[deg/s].