Design of agile signal conditioning circuits for microelectromechanical sensors

Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are used in many applications to detect physical parameters and convert them to an electrical signal. The output of MEMS-based transducers is usually not suitable to be directly processed in the digital or the analog domain, and they could be as small as femto farads in capacitive sensing and micro volts in resistive sensing. Consequently, high sensitivity signal conditioning circuits are essential. In this thesis, it is shown that both the noise and input capacitance are important parameters to ensure optimal capacitive sensing. The dominant noise source in MEMS conditioning circuits is flicker noise, and one of the best methods to mitigate flicker noise is the chopping technique. Three different chopping techniques are considered: single chopper amplifier (SCA), dual chopper amplifier (DCA), and two-stage single chopper amplifier (TCA). Also, their sensitivity and power consumption based on the total gain and sensing capacitance are extracted. It is shown that the distribution of gain between the two stages in the DCA and TCA has a significant effect on the sensitivity, and, based on this distribution, the sensitivity and power consumption change significantly. For small sensor capacitances, the highest sensitivity could be achieved by a DCA because of its ability to decrease the noise floor and the input sensor capacitance simultaneously. A novel DCA is proposed to reach higher sensitivity and reduced power consumption. In this DCA, two supply voltages are utilized, and the second stage is composed of two parallel paths that improve the SNR and provide two gain settings. This circuit is fabricated in the GlobalFoundries 0.13 μm CMOS technology. The measurement results show a power consumption of 2.66 μW for the supply voltage of 0.7 V and of 3.26 μW for the supply voltage of 1.2 V. The single path DCA has a gain of 34 dB with bandwidth of 4 kHz and input noise floor of 25 nV/√Hz. The dual path DCA has a gain of 38 dB with bandwidth of 3 kHz and input noise floor of 40 nV/√Hz. To be able to detect the signal near DC frequencies, another circuit is proposed which has a configurable bandwidth and a sub-μHz noise corner frequency. This circuit is composed of three stages, and three chopping frequencies are used to mitigate the flicker noise of the three stages. The simulated circuit is designed in the GlobalFoundries 0.13 μm CMOS technology with supply voltages of 0.4 V and 1.2 V. The total power consumption is of 6.7 μW. A gain of 68 dB and bandwidths of 1, 10, 100 and 1000 Hz are achieved. The input referred noise floor is of 20.5 nV/√Hz and the design attains a good power efficiency factor of 4.0. In the capacitive mode, the noise floor is of 3.6 zF for a 100 fF capacitance sensor