Upgrading a gyroscope from a lab-based setup into a pre-industrial demo: challenges and lessons learned

This work reports advancements in MEMS gyroscopes based on NEMS resistive detection, towards a prototype demonstration in operational environment. The developed system relies on two chips (the microelectromechanical system itself and a low-noise front-end integrated circuit), off-the-shelf analog to digital (A/D) and digital to analog (D/A) converters, and, for the first time on such gyroscopes, on-board demodulation, and signal processing with no need for external instrumentation. These tasks are performed with a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), also implementing tracking of the drive frequency as an estimate of temperature. At 5-V supply, the system communicates to PC via USB or RS422 and yields 0.006 degrees/vhr angle random walk and sub-0.02 degrees/hr stability.