The disk resonator gyroscope is an attractive candidate for high-performance MEMS gyroscopes. This gyroscope consists of a sensor and readout electronics, and the characteristics of the sensor directly determine the performance. For the sensor, a high-quality factor and long decaying time constant are the most important characteristics required to achieve high performance. We report a disk resonator gyroscope with a measured quality factor of 510 k and decaying time constant of 74.9 s, which is a record for MEMS silicon disk resonator gyroscopes, to the best of our knowledge. To improve the quality factor of the DRG, the quality factor improvement mechanism is first analyzed, and based on this mechanism two stiffness-mass decoupled methods, i.e., spoke length distribution optimization and lumped mass configuration design, are proposed and demonstrated. A disk resonator gyroscope prototype is fabricated based on these design strategies, and the sensor itself shows an angle random walk as low as 0.001°/√h, demonstrating true potential to achieve navigation-grade performance. The gyroscope with readout electronics shows an angle random walk of 0.01°/√h and a bias instability of 0.04°/h at room temperature without compensation, revealing that the performance of the gyroscope is severely limited by the readout electronics, which should be further improved. We expect that the quality factor improvement methods can be used in the design of other MEMS gyroscopes and that the newly designed DRG can be further improved to achieve navigation-grade performances for high-end industrial, transportation, aerospace, and automotive applications.

High performance Microelectromechanical system (MEMS) gyroscopes are in great demand in the fields of precise navigation, automatic driving and precise attitude measurement. Honeycomb disk resonator gyroscope(HDRG) which works on wineglass-modes has many advantages including higher immunity to fabrication errors, better resonant mode consistency and better inner electrode arrangement, showing excellent potentials to be the next-generation MEMS gyroscope with high performance and good robustness. In this paper, a new HDRG prototype is designed based on the comprehensive optimizations of resonant structure and electrode configuration. The main structure parameters and the lumped-mass configuration are optimized systematically through the finite element simulation, while the configuration and arrangement of the inner electrodes are optimized based on the vibration amplification effect, offering systematic reference for the optimizations of other MEMS gyroscopes. The new HDRG is fabricated through a SOI fabrication technique and tested with a close-loop digital circuit. Quality factor of the optimized HDRG prototype reaches 650k, proving to be a record in silicon disk resonator gyroscopes. The bias instability of the optimized gyroscope reaches 0.015°/h under room temperature without any compensation, approaching the accuracy of navigation grade. Scale factor nonlinearity reached around 120ppm in the range of ±300°/s without compensation. The comprehensive performance is at the forefront of MEMS resonant gyroscopes.

Whole-angle gyroscopes have broad prospects for development with inherent advantages of excellent scale factor, wide bandwidth and measurement range, which are restrictions on rate gyroscopes. Previous studies on the whole-angle mode are based mostly on the linear model of Lynch, and the essential nonlinearity of capacitive displacement detection is always neglected, which has significant negative effects on the performance. In this paper, a novel real-time calibration method of capacitive displacement detection is proposed to eliminate these nonlinear effects. This novel method innovatively takes advantage of the relationship between the first and third harmonic components of detective signals for calibration. Based on this method, the real-time calibration of capacitive displacement detection is achieved and solves the problems of traditional methods, which are usually related to the vibration amplitude, environmental variations and other factors. Furthermore, this novel calibration method is embedded into a whole-angle control system to restore the linear capacitive response in real time and then combined with a microshell resonator for the first time to exploit the enormous potential of an ultrahigh Q factor and symmetric structure. The effectiveness is proven because the angle drift is reduced significantly to improve the scale-factor nonlinearity by 14 times to 0.79 ppm with 0.0673°/h bias instability and a 0.001°/s rate threshold, which is the best reported performance of the MEMS whole-angle gyroscope thus far. More importantly, this novel calibration method can be applied for all kinds of resonators with the requirement of a linear capacitive response even under a large resonant amplitude.

This letter presents a high performance rate-integrating honeycomb disk resonator gyroscope (HDRG). High Q factor resonator and symmetric vibration detection gain are the key to high performance rate-integrating gyroscope. By stiffness-mass decoupling design, HDRG can achieve high Q factor of about 600k and decay time of over 44s. A compensation method is applied to suppress the rate-dependent angular drift caused by the asymmetry circular distribution of detection gains. Finally, the rate-integrating HDRG shows an excellent bias instability of 0.038°/h, 1.05ppm scale factor nonlinearity, wide measurement range of over ±7000°/s and a threshold value of about ±0.0001°/s, which is the best performance in the reported rate-integrating MEMS gyroscopes.

This article reports a novel method to reduce the electrostatic and capacitive nonlinearities in a disk resonator gyroscope (DRG) and to further improve its ultimate oscillation amplitude for performances improvement. The DRG consists of multiple rings, in the working mode, the outer rings always have larger deformation than the inner rings, which is called the vibration amplification effect (VAE). Based on this effect, we propose a method to reduce the nonlinearity in a DRG by optimizing the electrode arrangement, that is, by using the inner electrodes for driving and the outer electrodes for sensing. To verify this method, a DRG with eight layers of driving electrodes was designed and fabricated. The influence of the electrode positions on the nonlinearity of the DRG was theoretically analyzed and experimentally tested. The results show that by using the nonlinearity reduction method, the nonlinearity of the DRG can be reduced and the ultimate oscillation amplitude can be increased to 49% of the capacitive gap, which is much larger than the oscillation amplitude of traditional DRGs. Meanwhile, the sensitivity of the DRG can be improved by 100% and the angle random walk and bias instability can be reduced by 53% and 63%, respectively.

High performance north-finding systems (NFSs) based on Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) gyroscopes are widely concerned over decades. This letter proposes a novel strategy for MEMS gyrocompassing, exploiting the measurements of a honeycomb disk resonator gyroscope (HDRG). Completely different from previous MEMS gyrocompassing approaches for drift reduction of MEMS gyroscopes (e.g., carouseling, maytagging), without any mechanical turning parts, the virtual rotating framework is greatly conducive to the compactness and reliability of NFSs. The experimental results show that the true north can be found with the accuracy of 0.48° for 5 minutes averaging time at 28° latitude, proving the possibility of eliminating the need for physical rotation of MEMS gyroscopes.