Development of silicon and quartz based MEMS high precision accelerometers

Conventional electro-mechanical inertial sensors are being replaced by MEMS versions which are miniature in size, light weight, cost effective, more reliable and sensitive, low power consuming and VLSI compatible. Although silicon is the most widely used material for MEMS, quartz has some advantage for realizing inertial sensors due to its piezoelectric property. The R&D activities undertaken in the authors’ laboratory in the area of MEMS based silicon and quartz acceleration sensors have been described. While the silicon accelerometer is based on the piezoresistive technique, the quartz double ended tuning fork (DETF) accelerometer works on the stress dependence of vibration frequency.