An anisotropic-wet-etched pitch or roll mode-matched gyroscope with slanted quadrature-cancellation electrodes

Abstract

This paper presents the design, fabrication, and preliminary characterization of a novel anisotropic-wet-etched silicon pitch or roll gyroscope fabricated on a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer without using the deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) process. The novel gyroscope features slanted electrodes with sub-micron gaps, which for the first time, enables electrostatic quadrature tuning in out-of-plane gyroscopes. Complete quadrature cancellation and perfect mode-matching of the drive and sense modes at 200 kHz are demonstrated in fabricated devices. Sensitivity characterization measures a scale factor of 35.4 pA/°/s under quadrature-cancelled mode-matched condition, showing ~10× improvement in scale factor compared to operation without quadrature compensation.