Temperature Dependence of Quality Factors at High Frequencies in MEMS Gyroscopes

An efficient simulation approach for obtaining the temperature-dependent thermoelastic damping (TED) quality factors of the mechanical modes in complex microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) gyroscopes is reported. It is shown that the temperature dependence of TED in an application-relevant temperature range can be obtained by a Taylor expansion of the full solution around room temperature. Our approach is much faster than performing the full simulation at every temperature. We find good agreement of our simulation results with measured data and show that TED is highly relevant for the overall quality factors of higher order modes.