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Section 4 of the manuscript was aimed to present a set of design rules in order for the process to be used in the fabrication of different type of applications. In this section a detailed explanation of these design rules are presented and supported with figures where suitable. 5In order to fabricate a device using this process, the following design rules should be considered during the design stage. The values used in this work for the fabrication of the accelerometers are shown in parentheses where applicable:

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In this paper, a mechanical amplification concept for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) physical sensors is proposed with the aim to improve their sensitivity. The scheme is implemented using a system of micromachined levers (microlevers) as a deflection amplifying mechanism. The effectiveness of the mechanism is demonstrated for a capacitive accelerometer. A proof-of-concept single-axis mechanically amplified accelerometer with an amplification factor of 40 has been designed, simulated, and fabricated, and results from its evaluation are presented in this paper. The sensor's amplified output has a sensitivity of 2.39 V/g using an open-loop capacitive pick-off circuit based on charge amplifiers. Experimental results show that the addition of the mechanical amplifier does not alter the noise floor of the sensor. The measured natural frequency of the first mode of the sensor is at 734 Hz, and the full-scale measurement range is up to 7 g with a maximum nonlinearity of 2%. It is shown, through comparison with a conventional design, that the mechanically amplified accelerometer provides higher deflection without sacrificing bandwidth.[2011-0231]