Thermomechanical noise of arrayed capacitive accelerometers with 300-NM-gap sensing electrodes

Abstract

Thermomechanical noise of arrayed capacitive accelerometers with sub-micrometer sensing electrodes was evaluated. The unit accelerometer of the array was 80-μm square, designed as a proportional scale-down of a conventional single-axis accelerometer. Since the size effect shows the capacitance sensitivity per unit volume increases by proportional downsizing, a 10-by-10 array of the one-tenth sized unit accelerometer would have the same sensitivity of a single accelerometer of same occupied area. However, the thermomechanical noise needs to be controlled and reduced by vacuum encapsulation because size reduction causes noise increase. By measuring the electrical impedance at the resonant frequency, the damping coefficient was estimated using electrical equivalent circuit modeling. The estimated thermomechanical noise was reduced below 3 μg√VHZ by encapsulating at 100 Pa, which is low enough for instrumentation applications.