Towards the optimization of excitation waveform for electrostatic resonant sensors with enhanced frequency stability

We study a novel excitation scheme for gap-closing electrostatically-actuated MEMS resonators. We show that this scheme can be used to cancel out the impact of feedback phase fluctuations on oscillator frequency stability, and hence on resonant sensor resolution. Furthermore, as opposed to previous noise evasion schemes, the proposed excitation scheme can be applied without any loss in drive efficiency compared to the linear case, and irrespectively of the softening or hardening nature of the dominant nonlinearity of the system.