Resonant pitch and roll silicon gyroscopes with sub-micron-gap slanted electrodes:Breaking the barrier toward high-performance monolithic inertial measurement units

This paper presents the design,fabrication,and characterization of a novel high quality factor(Q)resonant pitch/roll gyroscope implemented in a 40μm(100)silicon-on-insulator(SOI)substrate without using the deep reactive-ion etching(DRIE)process.The featured silicon gyroscope has a mode-matched operating frequency of 200 kHz and is the first out-of-plane pitch/roll gyroscope with electrostatic quadrature tuning capability to fully compensate for fabrication non-idealities and variation in SOI thickness.The quadrature tuning is enabled by slanted electrodes with sub-micron capacitive gaps along the(111)plane created by an anisotropic wet etching.The quadrature cancellation enables a 20-fold improvement in the scale factor for a typical fabricated device.Noise measurement of quadrature-cancelled mode-matched devices shows an angle random walk(ARW)of 0.63°√h^(−1) and a bias instability of 37.7°h^(−1),partially limited by the noise of the interface electronics.The elimination of silicon DRIE in the anisotropically wet-etched gyroscope improves the gyroscope robustness against the process variation and reduces the fabrication costs.The use of a slanted electrode for quadrature tuning demonstrates an effective path to reach high-performance in future pitch and roll gyroscope designs for the implementation of single-chip high-precision inertial measurement units(IMUs).