A Gold Proof-Mass Differential MEMS Accelerometer for Micro-G Level Sensing

This paper reports a gold proof-mass MEMS (Microelectromechanical systems) accelerometer with differential electrodes to achieve higher sensitivity (S
_m
) for micro-G level (G = 9.8 m/s
²
) sensing. To reduce Brownian noise (B
_N
), we employ gold material as the high-density proof mass. The gold proof-mass differential MEMS accelerometer is fabricated by the multi-layer metal technology. The actual BN and Sm of our device within 4 × 4 mm
²
are experimentally obtained to be 154 nG/√Hz, 3.1 pF/G, respectively. The experimental results confirm that the proposed gold proof-mass differential sensing structure would be useful to realize micro-G level sensing.