Active Frequency Control and Orthogonal Compensation for Temperature-Drift Suppression in MEMS Ring Gyroscopes

This article presents a dual-mode active frequency control (DM-AFC) technique utilizing dynamic stiffness compensation to address temperature-induced zero-bias drift and scale factor instability in micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) ring gyroscopes. Unlike conventional temperature compensation methods that often add system complexity, the proposed approach enables real-time quadrature error estimation and compensation, significantly suppressing thermal drift via demodulation phase correction. Simultaneously, the operating frequency is accurately stabilized through electrostatic stiffness tuning, decoupling the scale factor from temperature variations. Additionally, mechanical sensitivity is enhanced by reducing the frequency split between drive and sense modes, yielding a 4.3-fold increase in sensitivity and a 12.6-dB improvement in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The demodulation phase error was reduced from 0.0518° to 0.00188°, leading to a 37-fold reduction in temperature-drift coefficient. Experimental results demonstrate a scale factor nonlinearity of only 0.00542% over - 40 °C to 80°C—a 96.86% improvement—and a bias instability of 0.3755°/h. The method provides a strong temperature robustness solution for navigation-grade MEMS gyroscopes, without imposing significant system overhead.