PROTON RADIATION EFFECT ON MECHANICAL STRUCTURE OF SILICON MEMS GYROSCOPES

This paper examines the proton radiation effect on the mechanical structure of MEMS gyroscope based on the particle collision modelling and an experimental investigation, which provides a novel performance degradation mechanism and guidance for inertial MEMS devices in the space applications. We build a particle collision model for the first time to describe the proton radiation effect on the MEMS structure, which agrees well to the experimental results. The results indicate that the stochastic effects dominate the sensor output but no deterministic drift has been found. It also shows that the ARW and bias stability of the gyroscope vary linearly with the radiation dose rate.