This thesis reports the design and modelling of a MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical
system) based inertial accelerometer. The main motivation to design a differential type of
accelerometer is that such a kind of structure allows differential electrostatic actuation and
capacitive sensing. They can be operated at the border of stability also so that the “pull in”
operation mode can be explored. Such kinds of structures have a wide range of applications
because of their high sensitivity. One is in the field of minimally invasive surgery where
accelerometers will be combined with gyroscopes to be used in the navigation of surgical
tools as a inertial micro unit (IMU). The choice for the design of a structure with 1 Degree
ofFreedom(DOF) , instead of a 2-DOF device was instigated by the simplicity of the design
and by a more efficient 1-DOF dynamic model. The accelerometers were designed and optimized using the MATLAB simulator and COVENTORWARE simulation tool. First set
of devices is fabricated using a commercial foundry process called SOIMUMPs. The simulation tests show that the SOl accelerometer system yields 8.8kHz resonant frequency,
with a quality factor of 10 and 2.l2mV/g sensitivity. To characterize the accelerometer a
new semi automatic tool was formulated for the noise analysis and noise based optimization of the accelerometer design and the analysis estimation shows that there is a trade off
between the SIN ratio and the sensitivity and for the given design could be made much better in terms of SIN by tuning its resonant frequency.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/4165 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Kannan, Akila |
| Publisher | University of British Columbia |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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