Feedthrough effect in MEMS gyroscopes and fully differential feedthrough cancellation method

Abstract

In the operation of MEMS gyroscopes, the feedthrough signal is inevitably introduced through the feedthrough capacitance and significantly affects the performance of MEMS gyroscopes. The common feedthrough cancellation methods highly depend on the microfabrication process and the structural symmetry of MEMS gyroscopes, which cannot effectively eliminate the feedthrough signal. In order to solve this problem, a new feedthrough cancellation method based on a fully differential configuration is proposed in this paper. The influence of the feedthrough effect is analyzed by establishing an equivalent circuit model including the feedthrough capacitance and described by the admittance diagram. Different drive and detection configurations are compared for the problem of feedthrough mismatch on different paths. Based on the theoretical analysis, a fully differential feedthrough cancellation scheme combined with two inverse feedthrough cancellation circuits is proposed. The deviation of feedthrough signal caused by the asymmetry of two differential paths can be adjusted by the two inverse feedthrough cancellation circuits. The fully differential configuration can further increase the drive force and suppress the common mode errors. The experimental results indicate that the feedthrough signal is suppressed in a large degree by the designed feedthrough cancellation method. The feedthrough level is reduced by 50.53 dB, and the amplitude of the effective signal increases from 4.10 to 9.46 dB. The signal-to-noise ratio has an improvement of 212.48% than that before feedthrough cancellation. The proposed feedthrough cancellation method can significantly reduce the interference of feedthrough signals on the effective signal, effectively improving the signal quality of MEMS gyroscopes.