Experimental Study of pre-Stressed Micromechanical anti-Spring Structures

This paper presents a comparison study of asymmetrical and symmetrical anti-spring structure for MEMS inertial sensors. Positive and negative pre-stressed voltages were introduced to study the system's response. The simulation in COMSOL shows the 3-spring has a higher sensitivity. In the positive pre-stressed range, both the 3-spring and 4-spring systems show good linearity with the preload V
²
_p-
and are respectively, -9ppm/V
²
, -1.83ppm/V
²
with R
²
> 0.999. In the negative prestressed range, the 4-spring systems also show good linearity with preload V
²
_p-
and are -2.85ppm/V
²
while the 3-spring system's frequency shows quadratic with V
²
_p-
. The special performance determines the choice of the type of anti-spring structure due to the application requirements.