MEI Micro, Inc. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N211-012

Description

MEI Micro has developed a 6 DoF MEMS IMU that fills a critical gap between small, low cost, low performance consumer and industrial MEMS motion sensors and large, expensive high performance IMUs. The innovation that enables this is MEI Micro’s 3DS MEMS Fabrication Platform. The 3DS platform was developed in a commercial MEMS fab specifically to enable low cost fabrication of a high performance IMU. The key new elements of this platform include inertial proof masses that are orders of magnitude larger than the proof masses used in other MEMS inertial sensors, large planar sense electrodes, a wafer level all-silicon seal, and hermetic electrical feedthroughs that provide a vacuum tight chip level environment for the sense elements. Taken together these features provide very high sensitivity and low noise.  In this Phase 1 SBIR MEI Micro will integrate its 3DS MEMS IMU with a COTS IC and supporting electronics into a small (~10 cc ) package to demonstrate tactical grade gyroscope performance. In the Phase 1 Option MEI will further improve the electronics using proof mass averaging and anti-phase proof mass drive to reduce the noise an additional 2-5X to achieve navigation grade ARW.