Numerical Study of the Impact of Process Variations on the Motional Resistance of Weakly Coupled MEMS Resonators

This paper presents a numerical study of the impact of process-induced variations on the achievable motional resistance R-x of one-dimensional, cyclic and cross-coupled architectures of electrostatically transduced MEMS resonators operating in the 250 kHz range. Monte Carlo numerical simulations which accounted for up to 0.75% variation in critical resonator feature sizes were initiated on 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 9 coupled MEMS resonators for three distinct coupling architectures. Improvements of 100X in the spread of R-x and 2.7X in mean achievable R-x are reported for the case of 9 resonators when implemented in the cross-coupled topology, as opposed to the traditional one-dimensional chain.