A novel method for test and calibration of capacitive accelerometers with a fully electrical setup

Test and calibration cost is a bottleneck to reduce the overall production cost of MEMS sensors. One main reason is the cost of generating non electrical test stimuli. Hence, replacing the functional multi-domain test equipments with electrical ones arouses interest. The focus of this paper is on sensitivity testing and calibration through fully electrical measurements. A new method based on analytical expressions of the sensitivity with respect to both physical parameters of the structure and electrical test parameters is proposed The accuracy of the method is evaluated by mean of a high level model including global and intra-die mismatch variations. It is shown that an accurate estimation of the sensitivity can be achieved using only electrical measurements and that the dispersions on the sensitivity can be divided by about 7 after the calibration procedure. These results are promising enough for high volume production of low-cost sensors.