Development Of 6-Degree-of-Freedom (DOF) Inertial Sensors With A 8-inch Advanced MEMS Fabrication Platform

This paper presents the development of an 8-inch 6-Degree-Of-Freedom (6-DOF) inertial sensors based on an advanced capacitive inertial sensor fabrication platform. The platform integrates 3-axis gyroscopes and 3-axis accelerometers on the same chip. The fabricated sensors are vacuum packaged at wafer level with poly-silicon based through-silicon interposer (TSI) using aluminum-germanium (Al-Ge) eutectic bonding approach. Wafer-level measurement results indicate that a fabrication yield of greater than 92% and a vacuum level of ~100 mTorr have been achieved. The fabricated inertial sensors and the customized application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are encapsulated in a 5 mm5 mm1.3 mm quad-flat no leads (QFN) package using the plastic molding technology. The system-level characterization of the developed 6-DOF inertial sensors have been implemented. Several reliability tests conducted according to the relevant JEDEC standards prove that the packaged sensors are highly reliable and robust for a wide range of operating environments.