A CMOS-compatible high aspect ratio silicon-on-glass in-plane micro-accelerometer

Abstract

This paper presents a post-CMOS-compatible micro-machined silicon-on-glass (SOG) in-plane capacitive accelerometer. The accelerometer is a high aspect ratio structure with a 120 µm thick single-crystal silicon proof-mass and 3.4 µm sense gap, bonded to a glass substrate. It is fabricated using a simple 3-mask, 5-step process, and is fully CMOS compatible. A CMOS switched-capacitor readout circuit and an oversampled Σ–delta modulator are used to read out capacitance changes from the accelerometer. The CMOS chip is 2.6 × 2.4 mm2 in size, utilizes chopper stabilization and correlated double sampling techniques, has a 106 dB open-loop dynamic range, a low input offset of 370 µV, and can resolve better than 20 aF. The accelerometer system has a measured sensitivity of 40 mV g−1 and input referred noise density of 79 µg Hz−1/2. Using the SOG configuration, a post-CMOS monolithic integration technique is developed. The integration technique utilizes dielectric bridges, silicon islands and the SOG configuration to obtain a simple, robust and post-CMOS-compatible process. Utilizing this technique, an integrated SOG accelerometer has been fabricated using the University of Michigan 3 µm CMOS process.