Multi-coefficient eigenmode operation—breaking through 10°/h open-loop bias instability in wideband aluminum nitride piezoelectric BAW gyroscopes

Abstract In this paper, a modification to the eigenmode operation of resonant gyroscopes is introduced. The multi-coefficient eigenmode operation can improve cross-mode isolation due to electrode misalignments and imperfections, which is one of the causes of residual quadrature errors in conventional eigenmode operations. A 1400 µm annulus aluminum nitride (AlN) on a silicon bulk acoustic wave (BAW) resonator with gyroscopic in-plane bending modes at 2.98 MHz achieves a nearly 60 dB cross-mode isolation when operated as a gyroscope using a multi-coefficient eigenmode architecture. The as-born frequency mismatches in multiple devices are compensated by physical laser trimming. The demonstrated AlN piezoelectric BAW gyroscope shows a large open-loop bandwidth of 150 Hz and a high scale factor of 9.5 nA/°/s on a test board with a vacuum chamber. The measured angle random walk is 0.145°/√h, and the bias instability is 8.6°/h, showing significant improvement compared to the previous eigenmode AlN BAW gyroscope. The results from this paper prove that with multi-coefficient eigenmode operations, piezoelectric AlN BAW gyroscopes can achieve a noise performance comparable to that of their capacitive counterpart while having the unique advantage of a large open-loop bandwidth and not requiring large DC polarization voltages.