Overview
Physical properties of MEMS structures and CMOS die are not perfect because of fabrication variations in the silicon die and package stresses. The effects manifest as offset when the sensor is stationery and result in inaccurate motion sensing. When a gyro is stationary, the unwanted non-zero output is gyro offset. When there is no linear acceleration, the accel output is accel offset.
The offset affects sensor data integration result directly. The small amount of error from the offset can accumulate to become a bigger error. Most of applications need offset calibration.
This document will explain the details of sensor offset, which are very important to understand.
Version 1.3
