Design, Fabrication, and Performance Characterization of LTCC-Based Capacitive Accelerometers

In this paper, two versions of capacitive accelerometers based on low-temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) technology are developed, different with respect to the detection technique, as well as the mechanical structure. Fabrication of the key structure, a heavy proof mass with thin beams embedded in a large cavity, which is extremely difficult for the conventional LTCC process, is successfully completed by the optimized process. The LC resonant accelerometer, using coupling resonance frequency sensing which is first applied to LTCC accelerometer and may facilitate application in harsh environments, demonstrates a sensitivity of 375 KHz/g over the full scale range 1 g, with nonlinearity less than 6%, and the telemetry distance is 5 mm. The differential capacitive accelerometer adopting differential capacitive sensing presents a larger full scale range 10 g and lower nonlinearity less than 1%, and the sensitivity is 30.27 mV/g.