Determination of electrical and mechanical parameters in capacitive MEMS accelerometers using electrical measurements

This paper describes a simple technique for characterization of capacitive MEMS accelerometers. The method is based on electrical impedance (admittance) measurements of capacitive MEMS accelerometers treated as electrostatically-driven microelectromechanical resonators. By using this method, it is possible to determine some electrical and mechanical parameters including the shunt capacitance, the mechanical resonance frequency and quality factor. These parameters may serve as measures of structural integrity of the tested structures and their packages during reliability testing, for instance.