High performance gyro with fast startup time, high range, wide bandwidth, low noise and excellent vibration immunity

A low-cost, high-yield, low-power gyro is presented from which five high performance variants are created by altering operating conditions. Flexible design of the gyro and the excellent dynamic range is explained. The paper details the high performance aspects of each variant with results from large population of dies. Measured results show a start up time less than 3ms and gyro output nonlinearity less than 0.1% of the full scale specification up to at least 20,000°/sec. The gyro has 8-12°/hr Allen deviation performance with white noise of 0.01°/sec/√Hz and bandwidth of 2kHz.

I. Introduction

Micromachined gyroscopes have been in existence for many years for measuring angular velocity. They have many advantages over conventional gyroscopes, such as small-size, low-power and low-cost. Even though millions of micromachined gyroscopes have been manufactured and are used for automotive applications, they have not been able to meet the demands of high performance markets. Critical performance criteria include bias stability, noise, bandwidth and range. The present paper describes a small (0.15cc), light (0.5g), low-power (18mW) gyro. This gyro can be trimmed to produce five different variants each of which focuses on a different performance criteria. By using one common die to produce various high performance variants, the manufacturing process is extremely cost effective with one mask set and a single manufacturing flow.