Breakthrough in High Performance Inertial Navigation Grade Sigma-Delta MEMS Accelerometer

In this paper, we report a Sigma-Delta MEMS navigation grade accelerometer, which, to our knowledge, is the first reported MEMS accelerometer to reach navigation grade performances. This reported system encompasses a high stability and high shock resistance mechanical MEMS sensor, a 5th-order sigma-delta closed-loop electronic with digital loop filtering and high stability voltage reference. Reported performances for a full scale range of 15g, with shock survivability up to 4000g, are a 10 mu g bias stability under warm-up, a bias temperature slope below 200 mu g/degrees C, a scale factor temperature slope below 100 ppm/degrees C, 2nd order non-linearity below 20 mu g/g(2) up to 1 kHz and a white noise floor below 2 mu g/root Hz. The reported performances make this accelerometer of the same class as the traditional macro electro-mechanical quartz accelerometer.