Energy-Efficient CMOS Humidity Sensors Using Adaptive Range-Shift Zoom CDC and Power-Aware Floating Inverter Amplifier Array

Citation:

Li H, Tan Z, Bao Y, Xiao H, Zhang H, Du K, Shen L, Ru J, Zhang Y, Ye L, et al. Energy-Efficient CMOS Humidity Sensors Using Adaptive Range-Shift Zoom CDC and Power-Aware Floating Inverter Amplifier Array. IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits. 2021;56:3560-3572.

摘要:

This article presents an adaptive zoom-capacitance-to-digital converter (CDC)-based CMOS humidity sensor. The humidity sensor is realized by means of two differential capacitors whose dielectrics are sensitive to humidity. The sensing capacitors are interfaced with a zoom CDC, which consists of a successive-approximation-register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a 3rd-order delta–sigma modulator ( $Δ Σ \textM$ ). The SAR ADC eliminates the influence of the baseline capacitance to reduce the input range of the $Δ Σ \textM$ . To improve the energy efficiency of the CDC across the full input range, a power-aware floating inverter amplifier (FIA) array is proposed, which is configured based on the conversion results of the SAR logic. In addition, an adaptive range-shift (ARS) zoom CDC is proposed to: 1) resist off-chip parasitics and interference and 2) allow low redundancy and a more energy-efficient FIA-based comparator, thus reducing power consumption. The proposed CMOS humidity sensor is implemented in a 0.11- $μ \textm$ CMOS process. Measurement results show a capacitance resolution of 17.9 aF and an effective number of bits (ENOB) of 14.0 within a conversion time of 1.01 ms. The proposed humidity sensor consumes 1.5 $μ \textW$ of power and exhibits a 0.0094 % relative humidity (RH) resolution and a ±1.5 %RH peak-to-peak accuracy (3 $\sigma $ error of 5.5 %RH) among 12 chips from 20 to 85 %RH, and it achieves a figure of merit (FoM) of 0.135 pJ $\cdot $ %RH2, which is more than six times better than the state of the art.