An integrated packaged resonant accelerometer with temperature compensation

This paper describes the design, fabrication, and testing of an integrated packaged sensor that is composed of a micro resonant accelerometer and a temperature sensor. The resonant accelerometer with differential configuration consists of double quartz resonators and a silicon substrate. When acceleration is applied along the sensing axis, the inertial force induced by the proof mass will transfer force to the resonators, which causes an opposite frequency shift of the dual quartz resonators. The loaded acceleration can be measured through detecting the differential frequency shift. The symmetric differential configuration response to spurious effects of thermal loading and inelastic effect causing prestress in the resonators is similar, which can be reduced by detecting the differential frequency, effectively. However, during the manufacture and packaging process, the otherness of residual stress in two quartz resonators results in that the response of resonators to temperature variation is not strictly the same. In other words, this temperature drift cannot be eliminated by the structure design. Thus, a temperature sensor and an accelerometer were packaged in a shell together. These novel integrated sensors can measure acceleration and temperature simultaneously. With the testing temperature data, a novel temperature compensation that is a combination of the variable coefficient regression and least squares support vector machine is used for improving the performance of the accelerometer. By means of this compensation and field programmable gate array, a real-time and online compensation is achieved. The tumble testing results indicate that the sensitivity of the accelerometer is ∼16.97 Hz/g. With the temperature compensation, the output drift of the scale factor is improved by 0.605 Hz/g in the full temperature range, which is from 0.072 Hz/g to 0.015 Hz/g. The drift of zero bias is improved from 345 mg to 1.9 mg.