μblog: engineering from the trenches

This IC Friday installment sets two technological records: first MEMS IC imaged and first time oil immersion was used to allow 100x magnification (versus a maximum of 20x with air). This chip is a single axis Micro Electro-Mechanical System accelerometer which has a set of finger in the middle of the die that sense acceleration by measuring capacitance between the fingers. It is hard to tell from the pictures, but the fingers are not attached to the substrate where they interleave, allowing them to move with applied acceleration and thereby change their inter-finger capacitance. Hopefully, I will image the ADXL311 in the upcoming weeks, a more modern dual axis accelerometer.

( adxl150.pdf )

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