  This paper shows the effect of scaling silicon accelerometers down from MEMS
to NEMS. It models both electronics and Brownian noise sources for both
capacitive and resonant devices, and computes the minimum detectable signal
attainable. Computed results are remarkably close to published experimental
results. It shows the relatively low influence of the quality factor and of the
beam width in the resonant case. Different scaling rules are investigated, and
it appears that resonant sensing may satisfy some new application requirements,
in particular for critical dimensions below a few hundreds of nm, when it is
better resolved than capacitive sensing.
