Research of electromagnetic drive micromechanical gyroscope based on tunneling effect of multi-barrier nano thin films

Abstract

Multi-barrier nano-thin films device is a new device based on the quantum tunneling effect. This kind of device has piezoresistive effect and the piezoresistive sensitivity is about one order than that of silicon piezoresistive device. Thin film device fabricated by using molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) has the advantages of small temperature drift compared with the doped devices. Comparing with the electrostatic comb-drive mode, the electromagnetic driving approach is not only with simple structure and easy to fabrication, but also can achieve large displacement-driven. These two methods applied to the study of gyroscope can improve the sensitivity in essence. In this paper, a novel gyroscope structure with folding-type orthogonal beams is designed which is not only meet the drive approach, but also meet the detection conditions. The nano thin films device and gyroscope structure are fabricated by the GaAs surface micromachining and GaAs bulk micromachining processes respectively. The preliminary measurement results prove that the gyroscope design is feasible.