Design and Simulation Studies on Linearised MEMS Capacitive Accelerometer

Capacitive accelerometers are the widely used sensors for acceleration measurements. However, most of such capacitive accelerometers do suffer due to inherent nonlinearity since they depend on the changes in air gap when subjected to acceleration. There are research works reported in the past that attempted to overcome this problem by designs that vary the overlapping area, so that the device offers linear behaviour. But in such sensors, cross-axis performance is degraded and this study attempts to achieve better cross-axis performance by employing a half-folded spring structure. Such sensors have been studied in this work and their performance parameters are evaluated using IntelliSuite simulation. The results show better cross-axis performance compared with the previous reports.