Design and fabrication of MEMS gyroscopes on the silicon-on-insulator substrate with decoupled oscillation modes

The mode coupling is a major factor to affect the precision of the micro electromechanical systems(MEMS) gyroscope. Currently, many MEMS gyroscopes with separate oscillation modes for drive and detection have been developed to decrease the mode coupling, but the gyroscope accuracy can not satisfy the high-precision demand well. Therefore, high performance decoupled MEMS gyroscopes is still a hot topic at present. An innovative design scheme for a MEMS gyroscope is designed, and in this design, the inertial mass is divided into three parts including the inner mass, the outer mass and the main frame mass. The masses are supported and separated by a set of mutually orthogonal beams to decouple their movements. Moreover, the design is modelled by multi-port-element network(MuPEN) method and the simulation results show that the mode coupling of the gyroscope between driving and sensing mode was eliminated effectively. Furthermore, we proposed a new silicon-on-insulator(SOI) process to fabricate the gyroscope. The scale factor of the fabricated gyroscope is 8.9 mV/((o)·s) and the quality factor(Q-factor) is as high as 600 at atmosphere pressure, and then, the resonant frequency, scale factor and bias drift has been test. Process and test results show that the proposed MEMS gyroscope are effective for decrease mode coupling, furthermore, it can achieve a high performance at atmosphere pressure. Furthermore, the MEMS gyroscope can achieve a high performance at atmosphere pressure. The research can be taken as good advice for the design and fabrication of MEMS gyroscope, meanwhile, it also provides technical support for speeding up of MEMS gyroscope industrialization.