The DIVA Accelerometer and VIG Gyro: Two Quartz Inertial MEMS for Guidance and Navigation Applications

ONERA, the French National Establishment for Aerospace Research, in partnership with DGA (the French MoD Procurement Agency), has been developing for a few years a new generation of inertial sensors, working within a vibrating mode. Those vibrating sensors, manufactured with micro-machining technologies, are particularly well suited for low cost and miniaturized inertial measurement units, to be used in e.g. stabilization, guidance or inertial navigation applications. Presently, ONERA is developing two monolithic quartz sensors, a Vibrating Beam Accelerometer (VBA) “DIVA” (Differential Inertial Vibrating Accelerometer) and a Coriolis Vibrating Gyro (CVG) “VIG” (Vibration Integrated Gyro). The main originality of the inertial sensors developed at ONERA concerns the high level of insulation of the useful vibrations. This paper describes the concepts of the DIVA and the VIG sensors. Specific problems as the locking zone in VBA and the mechanical coupling between the two useful vibrations in CVG are discussed. The manufacturing process is described and principal performances of the DIVA and VIG sensors are given: a few 100 µg for a measurement range of +- 100 g for the DIVA accelerometer and an output noise of 0.01 degree/s/SquareRoot(Hz) in a 100 Hz bandwidth with a measurement range of +- 1000 degrees/s for the VIG gyro.