A Low-Power Thermal Wind Sensor in CMOS Technology

Wind sensors are widely used in many critical applications, such as navigation, weather forecast, aerospace and wind energy assessment. The thermal wind sensor can measure wind speed and direction at the same time, by measuring the temperature gradient on the sensor’s surface which is induced by the wind flow. Compared to traditional mechanical wind sensors, there are two main advantages for thermal wind sensors: Firstly, thermal sensors can measure the wind flow without any moving parts, thus no maintenance is required. Secondly, the sensing elements of the thermal wind sensor (such as heaters, thermopiles, etc) as well as its interface circuitry can be realized in a single CMOS chip. Therefore, the robustness of the sensor system can be enhanced. Despite these advantages, the existing CMOS thermal wind sensor’s relatively high power consumption strictly limits its applications. The scope of this thesis is the design and realization of a low-power CMOS thermal wind sensor with the competitive sensing accuracy as its mechanical counterparts. In order to achieve this, the constant power mode instead of traditional constant temperature difference mode i