SBIR Phase I: Commercialization of low-cost micro birdbath resonant gyroscope

The broader impact/commercialization potential of this project is to address the need for a small, low-cost, and high-accuracy angular rate and angular orientation sensor (also known as a gyroscope) for a wide range of applications. Gyroscopes are desired by many emerging applications such as inertial measurement units for small satellites such as CubeSats, autonomous vehicles, drones, and high-end wearable electronics. These applications require a gyroscope with a similar price (< $10) but ~10,000 times better accuracy than those currently used in smartphones. The birdbath resonator gyroscope (BRG) is a novel micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) gyroscope with a strong potential to satisfy the needs of these applications due to significantly better resonance quality and mechanical symmetry than current silicon gyroscopes. The economic impact of BRGs will be enormous since many industries can utilize high-performance gyroscopes to monitor the dynamics of their systems, provide positional awareness, and improve the performance of other parts of these systems. Availability of low-cost and high-performance gyroscopes will enable users to further understand their applications and explore their limits and applicability across a broad range of societal needs. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to develop a new batch-level microfabrication technology to enable the commercialization of low-cost, very high-performance MEMS gyroscope from fused-silica. Gyroscopes available today are either accurate but large and expensive (example: hemispherical resonator gyroscope), or small and cheap but inaccurate (example: smartphone gyroscopes). High-accuracy silicon MEMS gyroscopes in research are small and accurate but expensive. This is because silicon has fundamentally low mechanical resonance quality factor (Q) so it is difficult to manufacture high-accuracy gyroscopes with a high yield. The BRG is a gyroscope made from fused-silica and capable of having low cost, small size, and high performance. Its fused silica micro mechanical resonator can achieve significantly higher Q than silicon, which allows the BRG to be manufactured with a high yield. The BRG fabrication process uses a blowtorch to reflow-mold a fused silica substrate into three-dimensional hollow shells with dimensions of several 10s of micrometers to several millimeters with high geometrical accuracy. The proposed research will significantly enhance our understanding of the relationships among size, design, and process on the performance of the BRG as well as the relationship among detailed process parameters, yield and reproducibility on cost. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.