Sensing and Control Electronics for Low-Mass Low-Capacitance MEMS Accelerometers

Abstract : Circuit and system design techniques for sensing and controlling the motion of MEMS structures with ultra-small mass and ultra-small capacitance are investigated and are used to realize low noise integrated CMOS MEMS accelerometers. There are three sources of noise in MEMS accelerometers: electronic noise from sensor interface circuits; thermal-mechanical Brownian noise due to energy dissipation caused by damping; and quantization noise when analog-to-digital conversion is included. In sensing circuit design, we introduce a circuit noise model that is validated by experiments and provides insights on design trade-offs. We show a low noise architecture based on chopper stabilized continuous-time voltage sensing; input-referred noise minimization based on capacitance matching at the sensor/circuit interface; a robust sensing node biasing scheme using periodic reset for charging suppression; and offset cancellation using differential difference amplifier. An integrated CMOS MEMS accelerometer prototype using these techniques achieves 50 micrograms/(square root Hz) noise floor which is close to the Brownian noise floor, and > 40 dB of sensor offset reduction. At the system level, force-balanced electromechanical delta-sigma modulation with high-Q micromechanical transducer is investigated to reduce Brownian noise and quantization noise altogether. A single loop architecture is introduced along with the switched-capacitor circuit implementation of the loop filter. A digital force feedback scheme called complementary pulse density modulation (CPDM) is proposed to realize highly linear offset- insensitive feedback using nonlinear actuators. Simulations show such systems realize high-resolution A/D conversion with 100 dB dynamic range and micrograms/(square root Hz) quantization plus Brownian noise floor while simultaneously provide robust control to the high-Q micro structure to obtain near optimum closed-loop settling and less than 2 Angstrom proof-mass position error.

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