Development of a modal analysis accelerometer based on a tunneling displacement transducer

An accelerometer based on a tunneling displacement transducer is presented. The sensor is fabricated using silicon micromachining techniques for fabrication of the seismic mass, the suspension beams and the tunneling tip and electrodes. The demonstrated accelerometer shows linear response from 0.2 mg to 20 g (159 Hz), and shows a 1 kHz bandwidth. The electron tunneling accelerometer can be used in applications where both a high dynamic range and a reasonable bandwidth are required.