A Transfer Function Approach to Shock Duration Compensation for Laboratory Evaluation of Ultra-High-G Vacuum-Packaged MEMS Accelerometers

This paper proposes a transfer function method to estimate the performance of ultra-high-g vacuum-packaged microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) accelerometers under practical shock conditions based on test results from laboratory shock test instruments (lab instruments). As a first step to achieve the transfer function, we investigated the elastic-wave, resonant, and quasi-static responses of micro structures by time-domain analysis. The transfer function is theoretically derived from the time-domain analysis, and aims to eliminate the influence due to the difference between laboratory and practical shock durations. This enables us to obtain the mechanical responses of MEMS accelerometers under objective in-use shock loads based on laboratory shock test results, despite of the different shock durations. This transfer function method also can be adopted for the test of other types of high-g MEMS inertial sensors.