A MEMS Convective Accelerometer Equipped with On-Chip Facilities for Sensitivity Electrical Calibration

In this paper, we propose an alternate electrical-only strategy to perform both test and calibration of MEMS convective accelerometers´ sensitivity. The idea is calibrate device sensitivity through the adjustment of the power dissipated in the heater element. For this, the system is equipped with an on-chip programmable digital pulse modulated generator and an iterative search procedure based on simple impedance measurements is implemented. The method is evaluated through Monte-Carlo simulations considering typical process variations and results are presented to demonstrate the potentialities of the technique.