Preamplifier Circuits Design and Sensing Systems Integration

• Main Authors: Chun-Hao Chen, 陳春豪
• Other Authors: 呂學士
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/50441995117895723710

博士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 電子工程學研究所 === 96 === The dissertation is a research about preamplifier circuits design and sensing systems integration to reduce the sensor cost and form factor. The lower cost and smaller form factor sensing systems will open new portable/wearable health monitoring applications. On the other hand, the low voltage and low power sensing interface circuits can be realized by the advance of CMOS semiconductor process. In the first application, a system-on-a-chip (SOC) IC with digital, analog and RF circuits is proposed by using UMC 0.18 μm CMOS process. The SOC IC includes a preamplifier, an analog-to-digital converter (ADC), a micro-controller unit and a RF transceiver. The preamplifier operates at 1.8 V and consumes 261 μW. The ADC (designed by Yu-Che Yang) operates at 1.8 V, consumes 135 μW and has the 25 KSample/s sampling rate. The micro-controller unit operates at 500 KHz. The transceiver uses the ASK architecture and operates at 433 MHz. The ASK receiver (designed by Yu-Tso Lin) operates at 0.45 V, consumes 1.36 mW and has 2 Mbps bit rate. The ASK transmitter (designed by Hsiao-Chin Chen) operates at 1.73 V, consumes 19 mW and has 500 Kbps bit rate. The bio-medical wireless (BMW) SOC can be integrated with C-reactive proteins (CRP) sensor fabricated by professor Long-Sun Huang’s research group in the Institute of Applied Mechanics, National Taiwan University. This CRP BMW sensor had been published in ISSCC 2006 by invited paper. In sensor applications, the instrumentation amplifiers (IAs) are usually adopted. To reduce the power consumption, area and cost, we use the differential difference amplifier (DDA) to realize the low power and small area IA. First we use TSMC 0.13 μm CMOS technology to design a DDA operated at 1.2 V and consumed 2.4 μW. The DDA has the 74.6 dB open-loop gain, 50 KHz unity gain frequency and 480 μV input-referred dc offset voltage. Furthermore, we also use TSMC 0.35 μm CMOS technology to design a programmable gain IA (PGIA). The gain is controlled by three digital bits and is from 24 to 38 dB. The power consumption of the PGIA is 18 μW operated at 3 V. It can be integrated with the wireless tire pressure sensors. Finally, we proposed a new DDA architecture to reduce the power supply voltage for lower power consumption. The DDA operates at 1 V, consumes 680 nW, has unity gain frequency at 2.5 KHz and fabricated in TSMC 0.35 μm CMOS technology.