A temperature self-calibrating torsional accelerometer with fully differential configuration and integrated reference capacitor

This paper reports a new silicon MEMS torsional accelerometer with self-calibration against dynamic temperature environment by taking two structure optimizations compared with the conventional torsional accelerometers: a fully differential configuration and an integrated reference capacitor configuration. The fully differential configuration realizes the self-calibration of the acceleration measurement, by making the two pairs of differential structures have the same sensitivity to temperature but opposite sensitivity to acceleration. And the integrated reference capacitor configuration realizes the self-calibration of the signal transform, by transferring the temperature sensitive reference capacitor from ASIC or PCB to the micro structure. Comparing tests show that output drift in the full temperature range of the accelerometer has a great improvement, from 910 mg to 61 mg, which experimentally demonstrates the effectivity of the two configuration optimizations.