A vacuum packaged surface micromachined resonant accelerometer

This paper describes the operation of a vacuum packaged resonant accelerometer subjected to static and dynamic acceleration testing. The device response is in broad agreement with a new analytical model of its behavior under an applied time-varying acceleration. Measurements include tests of the scale factor of the sensor and the dependence of the output sideband power and the noise floor of the double-ended tuning fork oscillators as a function of the applied acceleration frequency. The resolution of resonant accelerometers is shown to degrade 20 dB/decade beyond a certain characteristic acceleration corner frequency. A prototype device was fabricated at Sandia National Laboratories and exhibits a noise floor of 40 mug/rootHz for an input acceleration frequency of 300 Hz.