This paper presents a silicon oscillating accelerometer (SOA) with a new CMOS readout circuit architecture. A phase lock loop (PLL) with a hybrid and antinoise folding PFD is employed to sustain the oscillation of the MEMS oscillator, and the oscillation amplitude is set by an external reference. In addition, a sigma-delta frequency-to-digital converter is combined with the PLL to digitize the accelerometer's frequency output for low power consumption. The MEMS transducer and the readout circuit are fabricated in an 80-μm SOI and standard 0.35-μm CMOS process, respectively. The SOA achieves 0.23-μg bias instability and 1-μg/Hz1/2 acceleration noise density with a ±30 g full-scale, which are equivalent to 4-ppb relative instability and 17-ppb/Hz1/2 relative acceleration noise density. It only consumes 2.7 mW under a 1.5 V supply.

A label-free and selective aptamer beacon-based Love-wave biosensing device was developed for prostate specific antigen (PSA) detection. The device consists of the following parts: LiTaO₃ substrate with SiO₂ film as wave guide layer, two set of inter-digital transducers (IDT), gold film for immobilization of the biorecongniton layer and a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microfluidic channels. DNA aptamer, or “artificial antibody”, was used as the specific biorecognition probe for PSA capture. Some nucleotides were added to the 3'-end of the aptamer to form a duplex with the 3'-end, turning the aptamer into an aptamer-beacon. Taking advantage of the selective target-induced assembly changes arising from the “aptamer beacon”, highly selective and specific detection of PSA was achieved. Furthermore, PDMS microfluidic channels were designed and fabricated to realize automated quantitative sample injection. After optimization of the experimental conditions, the established device showed good performance for PSA detection between 10 ng/mL to 1 μg/mL, with a detection limit of 10 ng/mL. The proposed sensor might be a promising alternative for point of care diagnostics.

Temperature fluctuations seriously damage the performance of resonant accelerometers. Two approaches have been proposed in this paper to address this problem. In structural design, electrostatic softening spring is utilized to modulate the external acceleration on the frequency of resonator’s anti-phase modal without any stress transmission, and thus improve the thermal robustness of the accelerometer. In control circuit, continuous ring-down technique is employed for real-time quality factor (utilized as a virtual thermometer) monitoring, which attenuates measuring hysteresis and improves the precision of temperature compensation. A prototype is implemented to verify the proposed approaches. Experiments show that this accelerometer is insensitive to stress and has better performance of temperature compared with vibration beam resonant accelerometer. The bias stability of acceleration output was improved from 35.2mg to 0.08mg with real-time quality factor compensation ranging from −40°C to +40°C.

The rate-integrating gyroscope (RIG) operation is considered as the next generation architecture for hemispherical resonator gyroscopes (HRGs) with advantages of direct angle measurement and unlimited dynamic range. However, this RIG operation requires high symmetry for the HRG device and the damping mismatch of the two gyroscopic modes will result in a dead area problem. This work analyzes the error mechanism of the damping asymmetry induced dead area and proposed a novel virtual procession compensation method for HRG RIG. The simulation proves the existence of the dead area as the theory predicted. More importantly, the experimental HRG RIG platform with the proposed compensation method can significantly expand the dynamic range with accurate angle measurement and overcome the problem of dead area. The earth rotation is accurate measured which is the first time that captured by a RIG scheme as a state-of-the-art result.

The establishment of the Aircraft Dynamic Model (ADM) constitutes the prerequisite for the design of the navigation and control system, but the aerodynamic parameters in the model could not be readily obtained especially for small-scaled fixed-wing UAVs. In this paper, the procedure of computing the aerodynamic parameters is developed. All the longitudinal and lateral aerodynamic derivatives are firstly calculated through semi-empirical method based on the aerodynamics, rather than the wind tunnel tests or fluid dynamics software analysis. Secondly, the residuals of each derivative are proposed to be identified or estimated further via Extended Kalman Filter(EKF), with the observations of the attitude and velocity from the airborne integrated navigation system. Meanwhile, the observability of the targeted parameters is analyzed and strengthened through multiple maneuvers. Based on a small-scaled fixed-wing aircraft driven by propeller, the airborne sensors are chosen and the model of the actuators are constructed. Then, real flight tests are implemented to verify the calculation and identification process. Test results tell the rationality of the semi-empirical method and show the improvement of accuracy of ADM after the compensation of the parameters.