Design space exploration and synthesis of a CMOS-MEMS Z-axis accelerometer.
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Resumen
This thesis presents a design space exploration of a CMOS-MEMS z-axis accelerometer and an approach towards the development of a synthesis procedure of this type of accelerometer. In this work, a CMOS-MEMS z-axis accelerometer is designed and a series of equations to model its behavior are proposed. The accelerometer consists on a mechanical structure suspended on a silicon substrate that suffers a displacement upon certain acceleration. By using a capacitive interface, this displacement can be measured and the acceleration can be calculated. This accelerometer will be fabricated using a 0.35um CMOS process with three metal layers. In the design space exploration, several dimensions of the designed accelerometer are varied over a range of valúes and the performance characteristics are obtained analytically using the proposed equations. The dimensions to be varied are the length and width of the beams of the spring system of the accelerometer, as well as the number of beams in the spring system. In order to valídate the accuracy of the analytical results, the performance characteristics of each accelerometer structure are also obtained by system-level simulations performed using the Architect module of the Coventorware software suite. The máximum error between the analytic and the simulation results for the resonance frequency was 6.3%.