Encapsulated high frequency (235 kHz), high-Q (100 k) disk resonator gyroscope with electrostatic parametric pump

In this paper, we explore the effects of electrostatic parametric amplification on a high quality factor (Q > 100 000) encapsulated disk resonator gyroscope (DRG), fabricated in < 100 > silicon. The DRG was operated in the n = 2 degenerate wineglass mode at 235 kHz, and electrostatically tuned so that the frequency split between the two degenerate modes was less than 100 mHz. A parametric pump at twice the resonant frequency is applied to the sense axis of the DRG, resulting in a maximum scale factor of 156.6 mu V/(degrees/s), an 8.8x improvement over the non-amplified performance. When operated with a parametric gain of 5.4, a minimum angle random walk of 0.034 degrees/root h and bias instability of 1.15 degrees/h are achieved, representing an improvement by a factor of 4.3x and 1.5x, respectively. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.