Investigating the impact of resonant cavity design on surface acoustic wave gyroscope

Abstract

This paper reports on the impact of the design of the resonant cavity on the noise performance of Surface Acoustic Wave Gyroscopes (SAWG). Inherently matched SAWGs were built on Y-cut Lithium Niobate (LN). Differently from all prior SAWG demonstrations, a large mass formed by periodically placed Au pillars were made to vibrate in-plane (and not out-of-plane) so as to measure rotation orthogonal to the gyroscope surface. Two cavity sizes were investigated. The larger cavity SAWG provided better performance. The experimental data agree well with theoretical expectations, hence validating our models.