High Sensitive Tilt Sensor for Quartz Micromachining

Abstract

Many kinds of tilt sensors have been developed and applied to the field of tilt angle measurement. However, the improvement of a “Size”, “Cost”, “Operability” and other “Performances” is expected. On the other hand, the high performance acceleration sensors were developed by MEMS technology, but there is almost no high sensitive MEMS sensor that detects a minute gravity change. We examined the possibility of development of tilt sensor fabricated by quartz crystal anisotropic-etching technology which is suitable for mass production.
The developed tilt sensor is constructed of “Beam spring”, “Moving element” and “Capacitive detector of comb electrode”. The feature of this sensor is that sensor chip is placed horizontally, and this arrangement enables fabrication of “Two axes sensor” on one wafer chip. We developed quartz tilt sensor using our laboratory fabrication process. Size of sensor chip is 5×5×0.1 mm³, and the evaluation result showed the highest level performance of 0.0001 degree resolution.