A Novel Pull-in Accelerometer Based on

Cantilever Beam Mass Structure

Heng Yang, Zhengyin Yu, Xinxin Li, Yuelin Wang
State Key Laboratory of Transducer Technology
Shanghai Institute of Micro System and Information Technology
Shanghai, China
h.yang@mail.sim.ac.cn
accelerometer features a pulse width modulated output,
which can be measured by a full digital readout circuit. As
the pull-in time accelerometer bypasses the capacitive
sensing, the structure can be scaled down further. Compared
with the pull-in voltage mode proposed by W. C. Tang, the
pull-in time accelerometer is expected to have a better
performance as the initial conditions were determined.

AbstractDescribed in this paper is a novel accelerometer,

which measures the pull-in time to obtain the acceleration. As
the pull-in time can be measured with a full digital circuit, no
analog circuit is needed. The structure is very compact and can
be scaled down further since the device bypasses the capacitive
sensing. The accelerometer is based on a cantilever structure
with one driving electrode and one detecting electrode on each
side. The driving electrodes are around the center of the
cantilever, while the detecting electrodes are around the tip.
The device features a small traveling ratio, which is defined as
the ratio between the maximum traveling distance of the center
and the initial cantilever-electrode-gap, due to the characteristics of the cantilever structure. A small traveling ratio leads
to a better performance according to the analysis. The
prototype is fabricated with the bulk micromachining. The
design, fabrication and the initial measurement is presented.

I.

II.

A. The structure and the principle

The top view of the pull-in accelerometer is illustrated in
Fig.1. There are one driving electrode and one detecting
electrode on each side of the cantilever beam mass structure,
which can move in the x-y plane.

INTRODUCTION

The cantilever beam mass structure, which is connected

to the ground, is driven into pull-in at the detecting electrode
1 and 2 alternately, by the driving signals 1 and 2, which
are connected to the driving electrode 1 and 2, respectively.

Many of the surface micromachined accelerometers

employ capacitive sensing, which requires a complex analog
readout circuit and suffers from parasitic effects. A surface
micromachined accelerometer has to be big enough to obtain
a reasonable sensing capacitance, which is a bottleneck to
scale down the structure further. A surface micromachined
accelerometer also suffers from a low pull-in voltage, as the
surface effect becomes more and more important when the
structure scales down.

The driving signal is shown in Fig.2. The high voltage

VH of the driving signals is higher than the pull-in voltage of
the structure while the low voltage VL is lower than the pull-

Though the low pull-in voltage is a problem in the

surface accelerometer with capacitive sensing, it can be
employed to measure the acceleration. W. C. Tang proposed
a novel semi-digital accelerometer[1][2], which measured
the pull-in voltage to obtain the acceleration since the pull-in
voltage is the function of the acceleration. As the driving
voltage varies from 0 to the pull-in voltage, an analog circuit
is still needed to generate the driving signal. The other drawback was that the initial conditions of the device was not
determined.

Figure 1. The structure of the pull-in accelerometer

It was proposed by the authors that the pull-in time could

also be used to measure the acceleration[3]. The pull-in time

The work is supported by the project 60406009 of NSFC.

0-7803-9056-3/05/$20.00 2005 IEEE.

DESIGN

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Figure 3. The cantilever can be modeled as a rotating structure

than the beam. The axle of the rotating structure, which is

marked as O in Fig.3, is at the center of the beam
approximately. The normalized dynamic equation of the
rotating structure can be written as

Figure 2. The driving signals and the output signals

~
&&

~&

+ 2 + = T

off voltage. There is a phase lag, WD, between 1 and 2.

The pull-in time from the detecting electrode 2 to 1 is Tp1,
and from the detecting electrode 1 to 2 Tp2. When there is no
acceleration in the x direction, Tp1=Tp2=T0. When there is an
acceleration in the y direction, Tp1 decreases while Tp2
increases. The differential pull-in time, T=Tp2-Tp1, is
proportional to the acceleration, which can be used to
measure the accleration. T is a pulse-width-modulated
signal and can be measured with a digital circuit. Therefore,
the pull-in time accelerometer is a digital device. As the
cantilever is very soft, the capacitors formed by the side
walls of the driving electrodes and the mass are big enough
to obtain a relatively low pull-in voltage, which leads to a
very compact structure.

xdx

(1 x~ )

+ a~

(1)

~&
~
~
where = / d , d = d 0 (L a1 2 ) , = d d ,
~
&~&
= d 2 d 2 , = 0t , 0 the circular resonant
~
frequency, the damping ratio, T = 0 hV 2 2 K d3 the
dimensionless driving torque, K = T / , a~ = Ta (K d ) the
dimensionless acceleration and Ta the torque of the
acceleration.

The dimensionless differential pull-in time and the

nonlinearity are calculated by the Eq.(1). The results with the
assumptions = 0.5 and = 0.11 are shown in Fig.4 and
Fig.5, where = d 0 (a2 a1 2) d . It is observed from the
figures that both the sensitivity and the nonlinearity decrease
with the increasing of the driving torque and increase with
the increasing of the damping. Further analysis shows that
the nonlinearity is proportional to a~ 3 . As a~ is always
smaller than 1, the nonlinearity is small.

The detecting electrode 1/2 is connected to 5 volt via a

resistor. If the mass does not touch the electrode, the voltage
of the electrode is 5 volt. If the mass touches the electrode,
the voltage of the electrode drops to 0 volt, as the mass is
connected to the ground. The surface of the detecting
electrodes and the mass must be coated with a layer of Au to
ensure the good contact.
When the cantilever structure is driven into vibration by
the signals 1 and 2, the voltages of the detecting
electrodes 1 and 2 are shown in Fig.2 as S1 and S2. The Tp1
and Tp2 are the pull-in time. The Tb1 and Tb2 are the period of
the bounce after the mass hits the detecting electrodes. The
clean output signals without the period of the bounce, Vo1
and Vo2, can be obtained with a simple anti-bouncing circuit.
The driving signals 1 and 2 have to fulfill the relations
WH>WD>WL>TPmax and WD TPmax +Ts, where Tpmax is the
maximum pull-in time and Ts the safe time to ensure that the
cantilever structure is at rest at the pull-in position before the
next move.
B. Modelling
The cantilever beam mass structure can be modeled as a
rotating structure, as shown in Fig.3, with the assumptions
that the displacement of the mass is very small, the bending
of the mass can be neglected and the mass is much longer

Figure 4. as the function of

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~
Te

and

Figure 5. The nonlinearity as the function of

~
Te

and

Figure 6. The illustration of the processes

C. Design
Several devices were designed. The electrical and
mechanical properties were calculated. The parameters and
the calculating results of two of the designs are listed in
Table I. As it is possible to obtain the resolution of 10nsec
with TTL circuit, the type B800 can obtain the resolution of
0.02g, while the full scale is 12g with 0.33% nonlinearity.
A better performance can be obtained by increasing the size
of the mass and decreasing the width of the beam and the
gaps.
III.

6m gaps are etched on the double polished Si wafer;

The Si wafer is bonded to the glass by the anodic

bonding and thinned to 30m by 50%KOH;

The cantilever beam mass structures are formed by

deep plasma etching;

A thin layer of Au is sputtered on the surface.

A fabricated device of the Type B500 is shown in Fig.7.

It can be observed that the cantilever in the figure was driven
into the pull-in position by the very high voltage caused by
the SEM.

FABRICATION AND MEASUREMENTS

The C-V curve of the capacitor between the mass and a

driving electrode was measured by the LCR meter (Agilent
4284A), which is shown in Fig.8. It is obtained that the pullin voltage of the type B500 is 14volt, which matches quite
well with the simulation.

The prototypes of the pull-in time accelerometers were

fabricated by the bulk micromachining technology. The
processes are shown in Fig.6 and listed below:
Table I. The parameters of the designs.
Type

B500

B800

Beam

a1=50m, b1=2m, h=30m

Mass

(a2-a1)=
450m,
b2=20m,
h=30m

(a2-a1)=
800m,
b2=20m,
h=30m

Gaps between the mass and

the driving electrodes

3m

Gaps between the mass and

the detecting electrodes

3m

Resonant frequency

5.88kHz

2.82kHz

Pull-in voltage

15.2V

7.4V

Working voltage

30V

15V

Pull-in time

49.8sec

87.2sec

Tp1

79nsec/g

572nsec/g

Figure 7. The SEM of the device and the close-up at the tip
andaround the beam.

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Figure 8. The C-V curve between the mass and a driving electrode

The pull-in time was recorded with an oscilloscope. Fig.9

shows an example of the measurement. The VH of the
driving signal was 60V and the frequency was 10Hz. The
pull-in time was measured to be 27.36sec, while the
simulation result was 29.9sec with the assumption that the
damping ratio is 0.1. The period of bouncing was measured
to be 34.48sec.
IV.

Figure 9. 1 and S1 recorded by an oscilloscope.

V.

CONCLUSIONS

A pull-in time accelerometer, which features a digital

output, has been designed and fabricated. The initial
measurements show that the basic parameters, e.g. the pull-in
voltage and the pull-in time, match the design very well.
However, the relation between the pull-in time and the
acceleration is difficult to measure due to the high driving
voltage and the short life time. Better results are expected to
be obtained with the ongoing new design.

DISCUSSIONS

The relation between the acceleration and the pull-in time

has not been measured yet as some problems were found
during the measurements.
It was found that a very high driving voltage, e.g. 60 volt
or even higher, was needed to make sure the good contact
between the mass and the detecting electrodes, though the
pull-in voltage is only 14 volt, which was worse than the
results reported by S. Duffy et al [3]. It was also found that
the life time of the prototypes was short. It was observed that
the colour of the Au layer changed at the contact point after
several circles, which indicated that the failure was caused
by the electric power consumed at the contact point.

REFERENCES
[1]
[2]
[3]

After examining the devices, we concluded that the high

driving voltage and the short life time were caused by the
simple design of the contact point and the processes. A new
design is under way.

[4]

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W. C. Tang, Digital capacitive accelero-meter, US Patent 5353641,

Oct. 11, 1994.
W. C. Tang, Digital capacitive accelerometer, US Patent 5447068,
Sep.5, 1995.
H. Yang, L. Pakula, P. French. A novel operation mode for
accelerometers, Pacific rim workshop on transducers and micro/nano
technologies, July 22-24, 2002, Xiamen, China, pp.303-306.
Sean Duffy, Carl Bozler, Steven Rabe, Jeffrey Knecht, Lauren Travis,
Peter Wyatt, et al. MEMS microswitches for reconfigurable
microwave circuitry, IEEE Mirowave and Wireless Components
Letters, Vol. 11, No. 3, March 2001, pp.106-108.