A Broadband and Low Damping Piezoelectric MEMS Vibration Platform for 6-DOF Inertial Motion

Vibration platform-based inertia/force sources bring great benefits to the testing and calibration of micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) sensor performance. The traditional equipment has the defects of large size, complex installation, fixed position, and cumbersome operation, which makes it very difficult to test/calibrate MEMS sensors in situ. The key technical obstacle is the lack of accurate and compact inertia/force sources. Herein, this article reports a broadband and low damping piezoelectric MEMS vibration platform to provide 6-degree-of-freedom (DOF) inertial motion sources. The center stage of designed platform can provide accurately 6-DOF inertial vibration attributing to the four L-shaped suspension beams with 32 pattern PZT units. The simulation results show that the platform has excellent anti-interference with a vibration amplitude maximum drift ~0.05%. And the platform with 24 air-flow release slots has a lower damping, which reduces the coefficient of damping force on core vibration structure by ~65.3%. Also, we fabricate the $6.4\times 6.4\times0.5$ mm3 platform by standard MEMS technology. The developed vibration platform has prominent performances such as a broadband of ~1.2 kHz, a larger amplitude of $\sim 54 ~\mu \text{m}$ , and a higher linearity of >99.5% in the vibration range of $ < 48 ~\mu \text{m}$ . The uniformity between the experiment and the simulation results verifies the feasibility of the piezoelectric MEMS vibration platform, which provides accurately 6-DOF inertia sources with potential applications for MEMS sensor performance online calibration.