A Closed-Loop Interface for a High-Q Micromechanical Capacitive Accelerometer With 200 ng/ Hz Input Noise Density Honglin Xu, Xiaowei Liu, and

Abstract

In this paper, a fully-differential high-order switched- capacitor (SC) sigma-delta interface in a stand ard 0.5 m CMOS technology for a micromechanical capacitive accelerometer is presented. A 1 bit digital output is attained by the interface cir- cuit based on a low-noise front-end and a back-end t hird-order SC modulator, avoiding the use of a separate high-resolution converter to digitize the analog feedback signal. In addition, a micromechanical capacitive sensor element w ith a high quality factor (high-Q) is used to achieve high-resolution. Furthermore, closed-loop operation and electr ical compensation are employed for damping the high-Q to ensure the stab ility of the high-order system. The sensor consumes 23 mW of power from a single 7 V supply at a sampling clock of 250 kH z. Meanwhile, a sensitivity of 1.896 V/g is achieved with a noise floor of lower than 200 ng Hz in low-frequency. The sensor has a nonlinearity of 0.15% with an input range of 1.2g. The bandwidth (BW) is 300 Hz and the bias instability is 18 g.