A Novel Fully Differential Second Generation Current Conveyor and Its Application as a Very High CMRR Instrumentation Amplifier

This paper aims to introduce a novel Fully Differential second generation Current Conveyor (FDCCII) and its application to design a novel Low Power (LP), very high CMRR, and wide bandwidth (BW) Current Mode Instrumentation Amplifier (CMIA). In the proposed application, CMRR, as the most important feature, has been greatly improved by using both common mode feed forward (CMFF) and common mode feedback (CMFB) techniques, which are verified by a perfect circuit analysis. As another unique quality, it neither needs well-matched active blocks nor matched resistors but inherently improves CMRR, BW, and power consumption hence gains an excellent matchless choice for integration. The FDCCII has been designed using 0.18 um TSMC CMOS Technology with ±1.2 V supply voltages. The simulation of the proposed FDCCII and CMIA have been done in HSPICE LEVEL 49. Simulation results for the proposed CMIA are as follow: Voltage CMRR of 216 dB, voltage CMRR BW of 300 Hz. Intrinsic resistance of X-terminals is only 45 Ω and the power dissipation is 383.4 μW.  Most favourably, it shows a constant differential voltage gain BW of 18.1 MHz for variable gains (here ranging from 0 dB to 45.7 dB for example) removing the bottleneck of constant gain-BW product of Voltage mode circuits

Low-Noise Energy-Efficient Sensor Interface Circuits

Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a concept of connecting any devices on network where environmental data around us is collected by sensors and shared across platforms. The IoT devices often have small form factors and limited battery capacity; they call for low-power, low-noise sensor interface circuits to achieve high resolution and long battery life. This dissertation focuses on CMOS sensor interface circuit techniques for a MEMS capacitive pressure sensor, thermopile array, and capacitive microphone. Ambient pressure is measured in the form of capacitance. This work propose two capacitance-to-digital converters (CDC): a dual-slope CDC employs an energy efficient charge subtraction and dual comparator scheme; an incremental zoom-in CDC largely reduces oversampling ratio by using 9b zoom-in SAR, significantly improving conversion energy. An infrared gesture recognition system-on-chip is then proposed. A hand emits infrared radiation, and it forms an image on a thermopile array. The signal is amplified by a low-noise instrumentation chopper amplifier, filtered by a low-power 30Hz LPF to remove out-band noise including the chopper frequency and its harmonics, and digitized by an ADC. Finally, a motion history image based DSP analyzes the waveform to detect specific hand gestures. Lastly, a microphone preamplifier represents one key challenge in enabling voice interfaces, which are expected to play a dominant role in future IoT devices. A newly proposed switched-bias preamplifier uses switched-MOSFET to reduce 1/f noise inherently.PHDElectrical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137061/1/chaseoh_1.pd