No Physical Stimulus Testing and Calibration for MEMS Accelerometer

Conventional MEMS devices require physical stimulus for calibration and test. This is not only time consuming but also uses expensive equipment. In this paper, it is presented that an accelerometer can be tested and calibrated with no physical stimulus; this is achieved by using electrostatic forces applied at transducer test plates to excite the proof mass. It is demonstrated that gain parameters required to calibrate the device can be estimated using an extended Kalman filter algorithm provided an accurate physical system model is developed as a function of critical silicon process parameters. Our methodology is not only time efficient, but cost effective as well. This methodology may be applied to most silicon processes used for MEMS inertial sensors.