Personal tools

Design of MEMs Sensor Interface

From iis-projects

Jump to: navigation, search

Description

Microelectromechanical systems (MEMs) have been widely used as sensors in different applications such as acoustic sensors. In this domain, MEMs capacitance attracted broad attention due to its high dynamic range and sensitivity relative to the other transducers like electromagnetic or piezoresistive microphone. Optical microphones can play an attractive role as a sensor too, due to its not susceptibility to electrical noise and electromagnetic interferences (then leads to higher dynamic range), but with much higher cost.

Most of the capacitive MEMs microphone deployed a charge amplifier, as an interface ASIC, after the transducer to maintain the charge. This pre-amplifier needs to be low noise, low power, high input impedance and have good linearity in a sense that it does not create any other harmonics except the main acoustic signal in the input. Thus, the designer needs significant consideration to deal with the aforementioned parameters to adjust them in a coordinated range.

During this project, students will learn the key trade-offs challenging the engineers in designing sensor interface, deal with MEMs microphone as the main sensor for acoustic wave, design low noise amplifiers and variable gain amplifiers.

Status: Available

Looking for master students
Supervisor: Hesam Omdeh Ghiasi <hghiasi@iis.ee.ethz.ch>

Prerequisites

  • Analog Integrated Circuit Design

Character

  • 10% Literature review
  • 30% Theory
  • 60% Circuit Design

Professor

Prof. Taekwang Jang <tjang@ethz.ch>

Reference

[1] Jeong, S., Chen, Y., Jang, T., Tsai, J. M. L., Blaauw, D., Kim, H. S., & Sylvester, D. (2018). Always-On 12-nW Acoustic Sensing and Object Recognition Microsystem for Unattended Ground Sensor Nodes. IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, 53(1), 261–274. https://doi.org/10.1109/JSSC.2017.2728787

[2] Oh, S., Cho, M., Member, S., Shi, Z., Lim, J., Member, S., Kim, Y., Jeong, S., Member, S., Chen, Y., Rothe, R., Member, S., Blaauw, D., Kim, H., & Sylvester, D. (2019). An Acoustic Signal Processing Chip With 142-nW Voice Activity Detection Using Mixer-Based Sequential Frequency Scanning and. 54(11), 3005–3016.

[3] Shen, L., Member, S., Lu, N., Sun, N., & Member, S. (2018). A 1-V 0 . 25- μ W Inverter Stacking Amplifier With 1 . 07 Noise Efficiency Factor. 53(3), 896–905.

[4] Zawawi, S. A., Hamzah, A. A., & Majlis, B. Y. (2020). A Review of MEMS Capacitive Microphones. 1–26.

↑ top

Practical Details