A micro pitch and roll motion sensor

This paper describes a novel piezoresistive-type microsensor that could be directly mounted on the existing slider/gimbal system of a hard disk drive to simultaneously measure the pitch and roll angles of the slider. The size of the fabricated microsensor is designed as 1 mm/spl times/1 mm/spl times/0.1 mm for picoslider applications. The dynamic behavior of the system is slightly altered as expected in a simulation after the sensor is mounted on the slider and the fundamental frequency shift of pitch and roll motion is calculated to be less than 5% of the original system. Experimentally, the sensor performance is compared with interferometric measurement data and the mismatch is nominally within 14% in average.