Navigation-Grade Micro-Electro-Mechanical-System (MEMS) Accelerometer Technologies

The next generation of UAVs, missile interceptor seekers and combat and surveillance aerial vehicles are placing more demands on the navigation-grade IMUs. Existing navigation-grade accelerometers are expensive and bulky. MEMS accelerometers are very attractive due to their compactness and low cost. However, consumer-grade MEMS accelerometers have higher noise floors, smaller ranges, and higher thermal sensitivities than required for navigation-grade accelerometers. Thus, there is a need to develop MEMS accelerometers for the navigation application. SA Photonics is pleased to propose the development of a symmetric Loaded flexure MEMS Accelerometer (LMA). LMA provides accelerometer bias drift of < 50 micro-g rms, and scale factor error of a few ppm. It can measure accelerations more than 20 g with a velocity random walk of <5 micro-g/root Hz. These performance metrics are 8-300X better than those of leading COTS accelerometers. To achieve this performance, LMA will leverage SA Photonics’ micro-flexure pressure sensor and DSRCW detection technologies.