Thermal Calibration of Silicon MEMS Gyroscopes

We report our progress on the development of thermal calibration and stabilization for silicon MEMS gyroscopes with high quality (Q) factors. The temperature-induced drifts of most MEMS limit their potential applications in realworld missions. To address this limitation, we investigated a long-term bias drift compensation algorithm using the silicon MEMS quadruple mass gyroscope (QMG) with signal-tonoise ratio enhanced by 1.2 million Q-factor. The thermal calibration using an external temperature sensor removed a 99% temperature correlation between the temperature and the gyroscope output. The calibration stabilized the QMG output subject to temperature variations during a 24 hr run, resulting in Allan deviation bias instability improvement from 0.6 °/hr to 0.35 °/hr. Most importantly, this method removed a temperature ramp and resolved a 1 °/hr/ √ hr rate random walk, indicating and improved long-term stability.