This paper presents a new design of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) based low-g accelerometer utilizing mode-localization effect in the three degree-of-freedom (3-DoF) weakly coupled MEMS resonators. Two sets of the 3-DoF mechanically coupled resonators are used on either side of the single proof mass and difference in the amplitude ratio of two resonator sets is considered as an output metric for the input acceleration measurement. The proof mass is electrostatically coupled to the perturbation resonators and for the sensitivity and input dynamic range tuning of MEMS accelerometer, electrostatic electrodes are used with each resonator in two sets of 3-DoF coupled resonators. The MEMS accelerometer is designed considering the foundry process constraints of silicon-on-insulator multi-user MEMS processes (SOIMUMPs). The performance of the MEMS accelerometer is analyzed through finite-element-method (FEM) based simulations. The sensitivity of the MEMS accelerometer in terms of amplitude ratio difference is obtained as 10.61/g for an input acceleration range of ±2 g with thermomechanical noise based resolution of 0.22 μ$\mathsf{\mu }\mathrm{g}/\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$ and nonlinearity less than 0.5%.

This paper introduces the design implementation of 3-DoF Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) based gyroscope concept, which allows shaping up the dynamic response without using advance control system strategies, with less compromise in performance. The proposed architecture utilizes an active–passive mass configuration in order to achieve the dynamic amplification of the oscillation in 2-DoF drive-mode. A comprehensive theoretical description, dynamics, and mechanical design configuration of the proposed gyroscope design are discussed in detail. A complete test methodology has also been devised for the proposed nonresonant 3-DoF gyroscope. A cost effective commercially available metal-multi user MEMS process is used to fabricate a 20 μm thick nickel based micromachined vibratory gyroscope with an overall chip size of 2.2 mm × 2.6 mm. A good agreement is found between the tested and the simulated results. The experimental characterization demonstrated that the wide bandwidth frequency response of the 2-DoF drive-mode oscillator consists of two resonant peaks at 754 Hz and 2.170 kHz, respectively, with a flat region of 1.4 kHz between the peaks, defining the operational frequency region. The sense-mode resonant frequency lies within this region at 1.868 kHz allowing the amplitude of the response to be insensitive to structural parameter and damping variations, with improved robustness against such variations. The passive mass achieved a dynamic amplification of three times at first resonant peak of 754 Hz and five times at the second resonant peak of 2.170 kHz in comparison with the active mass, resulting in improved sensitivity in response to the Coriolis torque induced due to rotation.