A novel micro-accelerometer with adjustable sensitivity based on resonant tunnelling diodes

Resonant tunnelling diodes （RTDs） have negative differential resistance effect, and the current-voltage characteristics change as a function of external stress, which is regarded as mesc-piezoresistance effect of RTDs. In this paper, a novel micro-accelerometer based on AlAs/GaAs/In0.1Ga0.9As/GaAs/AlAs RTDs is designed and fabricated to be a four-beam-mass structure, and an RTD-Wheatstone bridge measurement system is established to test the basic properties of this novel accelerometer. According to the experimental results, the sensitivity of the RTD based micro-accelerometer is adjustable within a range of 3 orders when the bias voltage of the sensor changes. The largest sensitivity of this RTD based miero-accelerometer is 560.2025 mV/g which is about 10 times larger than that of silicon based micro piezoresistive accelerometer, while the smallest one is 1.49135 mV/g.

Micro-accelerometer Based on Vertically Movable Gate Field Effect Transistor

A vertically movable gate field effect transistor(VMGFET) is proposed and demonstrated for a microaccelerometer application. The VMGFET using air gap as an insulator layer allows the gate to move on the substrate vertically by external forces. Finite element analysis is used to simulate mechanical behaviors of the designed structure. For the simulation, the ground acceleration spectrum of the 1952 Kern County Earthquake is employed to investigate the structural integrity of the sensor in vibration. Based on the simulation, a prototype VMGFET accelerometer is fabricated from silicon on insulator wafer. According to current–voltage characteristics of the prototype VMGFET, the threshold voltage is measured to be 2.32 V, which determines the effective charge density and the mutual transconductance of1.545910-8C cm-2and 6.59 m A V-1, respectively. The device sensitivity is 9.36–9.42 m V g-1in the low frequency,and the first natural frequency is found to be 1230 Hz. The profile smoothness of the sensed signal is in 3 d B range up to1 k Hz.

Noise analysis and characterization of a full differential CMOS interface circuit for capacitive closed-loop micro-accelerometer

To achieve a high precision capacitive closed-loop micro-accelerometer,a full differential CMOS based on switched-capacitor circuit was presented in this paper as the sensor interface circuit.This circuit consists of a balance-bridge module,a charge sensitive amplifier,a correlated-double-sampling module,and a logic timing control module.A special two-path feedback circuit configuration was given to improve the system linearity.The quantitative analysis of error voltage and noise shows that there is tradeoff around circuit's noise,speed and accuracy.A detailed design method was given for this tradeoff.The noise performance optimized circuit has a noise root spectral density of 1.0 μV/Hz,equivalent to rms noise root spectral density of 1.63 μg/Hz.Therefore,the sensor's Brown noise becomes the main noise source in this design.This circuit is designed with 0.5 μm n-well CMOS process.Under a ±5 V supply,the Hspice simulation shows that the system sensitivity achieves 0.616 V/g,the system offset is as low as 1.456 mV,the non-linearity is below 0.03%,and the system linear range achieves ±5 g.

Wireless sensor network based on CC2530

This paper designs a wireless sensor network based on CC2530.The sensor nodes consist of multi-ranged accelerometer and CC2530,covering all the ranges of the acceleration signals which can be measured.The designed system solves the problems such as cable installation trouble of testing system,vulnerability to interference and complexity of circuit.Test results show that the designed wireless sensor network can transmit the signals that multi-ranged micro-accelerometer emits without spoilage,thus the measurement of acceleration of the covering region is completed.

Research of handwriting detecting system for space pen

A handwriting detecting system based on Micro- accelerometer and Micro-gyros is proposed. And the algorithm of the detecting system is also described in detail. And the error analysis of the detecting system is also described in de-tail. The motion contrail of the handwriting de-tecting in the 3-D space can be recognized through compute the matrix of attitude angles and the dynamic information of the handwriting detecting which is mapped on the 2-D plane. Then the information of contrail can be recurred on the writing plane by integral. There were good results in the actual experiment.