This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will seek to significantly enhance the performance of MEMS gyroscopic sensors through the use of innovative packaging. This effort will be the firs step in the commercialization of a technique for augmenting electrostatic MEMS devices through hermetically packaging them in a gas chemistry that possesses a relative permittivity significantly greater than one, which results in an equivalent gain in each of the fundamental equations governing the performance of electrostatic MEMS devices. For example, sulfur dioxide is one gas that has been identified as suitable for this application. The result of utilizing this technique is the realization of an equivalent performance MEMS device that can be smaller, lower voltage and/or more powerful than the same device packaged in a vacuum or a traditional gas chemistry.
MEMS gyroscopic sensors are particularly well suited to take advantage of this technology, due to the sensor's architecture where both electrostatic actuation and capacitive sensing are employed, and because of the large, but cost sensitive commercial market potential, which includes inertial sensing, automotive safety, the Segway Human Transporter and similar systems, and camcorder and digital camera image stabilization. If successful one of the outcomes of this effort will be an increased knowledgebase of the fluidic damping, dielectric breakdown, and relative permittivity voltage magnitude/frequency dependence properties of various gas chemistries that have not heretofore been investigated in this type of application. This should lead to new MEMS products, the application of existing MEMS products to new applications, and an enhanced understanding of the capabilities and limitations of micromachined devices.
