A novel capacitive biaxial microaccelerometer with a highly symmetrical microstructure is developed. The sensor is composed of a single seismic mass, grid strip, supporting beam, joint beam, and damping adjusting combs. The sensing method of changing capacitance area is used in the design,which depresses the requirement of the DRIE process, and de- creases electronic noise by increasing sensing voltage to improve the resolution. The parameters and characteristics of the biaxial microaccelerometer are discussed with the FEM tool ANSYS. The simulated results show that the transverse sensitivity of the sensor is equal to zero. The testing devices based on the slide-film damping effect are fabricated, and the testing quality factor is 514, which shows that the designed structure can improve the resolution and proves the feasibility of the designed process.
The influence of outside inertial shock combined with RF signal voltages on the properties of a shunt capacitive MEMS switch encapsulated in a low vacuum environment is analyzed considering the damping of the air around the MEMS switch membrane. An analytical expression that approximately computes the displacement induced by outside shock is obtained. According to the expression, the minimum required mechanical stiffness constant of an MEMS switch beam in some maximum tolerated insertion loss condition and some external inertial shock environment or the insertion loss induced by external inertial shock can also be obtained. The influence is also illustrated with an RF MEMS capacitive switch example,which shows that outside environment factors have to be taken into account when designing RF MEMS capacitive switches working in low vacuum. While encapsulating RF MEMS switches in low vacuum diminishes the air damping and improves the switch speed and operation voltage,the performances of a switch is incident to being influenced by outside environment. This study is very useful for the optimized design of RF MEMS capacitive switches working in low vacuum.
The comb capacitances fabricated by deep reactive ion etching （RIE） process have high aspect ratio which is usually smaller than 30 ： 1 for the complicated process factors, and the combs are usually not parallel due to the well-known micro-loading effect and other process factors, which restricts the increase of the seismic mass by increasing the thickness of comb to reduce the thermal mechanical noise and the decrease of the gap of the comb capacitances for increasing the sensitive capacitance to reduce the electrical noise. Aiming at the disadvantage of the deep RIE, a novel capacitive micro-accelerometer with grid strip capacitances and sensing gap alterable capacitances is developed. One part of sensing of inertial signal of the micro-accelerometer is by the grid strip capacitances whose overlapping area is variable and which do not have the non-parallel plate＇s effect caused by the deep RIE process. Another part is by the sensing gap alterable capacitances whose gap between combs can be reduced by the actuators. The designed initial gap of the alterable comb capacitances is relatively large to depress the effect of the maximum aspect ratio （30 ： 1） of deep RIE process. The initial gap of the capacitance of the actuator is smaller than the one of the comb capacitances. The difference between the two gaps is the initial gap of the sensitive capacitor. The designed structure depresses greatly the requirement of deep RIE process. The effects of non-parallel combs on the accelerometer are also analyzed. The characteristics of the micro-accelerometer are discussed by field emission microscopy （FEM） tool ANSYS. The tested devices based on slide-film damping effect are fabricated, and the tested quality factor is 514, which shows that grid strip capacitance design can partly improve the resolution and also prove the feasibility of the designed silicon-glass anodically bonding process.
DRIE(Deep Reactive Ion Etching)工艺加工的高深宽比梳齿电容不能保证绝对平行.本文在考虑低真空空气阻尼力的同时,研究了梳齿电容倾斜的MEMS传感器对脉冲惯性信号的响应,并分析了DRIE工艺因素对器件性能的影响.研究结果表明,当传感器为没有静电力反馈的双边电容结构时,梳齿电容的不平行对传感器的响应位移、惯性脉冲响应线性度范围影响明显,且随着封装真空度增加而加重.若传感器有静电力反馈,惯性脉冲响应的灵敏度降低,但DRIE工艺因素的影响程度降低.为了抑制DRIE工艺导致的梳齿电容不平行因素的影响,文中还设计了一个新型的变电容面积的MEMS惯性传感器,并用ANSYS初步分析了其性能,设计了其详细的制作工艺流程.
