Comparison of capacitive and frequential readout when scaling accelerometers down from Micro- to Nano- Electro Mechanical Systems

This paper shows the effect of scaling silicon accelerometers down from MEMS to NEMS. It models both electronics and Brownian noise sources for both capacitive and resonant devices, and computes the minimum detectable signal attainable. Computed results are remarkably close to published experimental results. It shows the relatively low influence of the quality factor and of the beam width in the resonant case. Different scaling rules are investigated, and it appears that resonant sensing may satisfy some new application requirements, in particular for critical dimensions below a few hundreds of nm, when it is better resolved than capacitive sensing.