This paper presents a MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical System) Silicon Oscillating Accelerometer (SOA) with AC (alternating current) polarization to expand its bias-instability limited by the up-converted 1/f noise from front-end transimpedance amplifier (TIA). In contrast to the conventional DC (direct current) scheme, AC polarization breaks the trade-off between input transistor gate size and white noise floor of TIA, a relative low input loading capacitance can be implemented for low noise consideration. Besides, a self-compensation technique combining polarization source and reference in automatic-gain-control (AGC) is put forward. It cancels the 1/f noise and drift introduced by the polarization source itself, which applies to both DC and AC polarization cases. The experimental result indicates the proposed AC polarization and self-compensation strategy expand the bias-instability of studied SOA from 2.58 μg to 0.51 μg with a full scale of ± 30 g, a 155.6 dB dynamic range is realized in this work.
Keywords: AC polarization; MEMS oscillating accelerometer; bias-instability; flicker noise; front-end TIA; self-compensation.