A High-Linearity Capacitance-to-Digital Converter Suppressing Charge Errors From Bottom-Plate Switches

A high-precision capacitance-to-digital converter (CDC) that is configurable to interface with unipolar or push-pull-type capacitive sensors is presented in this paper. In the conventional switched-capacitor CDC, it is well known that clock feedthroughs and charge injections from top-plate switches can be eliminated by a bottom-plate sampling scheme. However, those charge errors from the bottom-plate switches depend on the digital output and the varying value of the sensing capacitor itself. They will thus affect the overall CDC linearity. When the varying range of the sensing capacitor is wide, the nonlinearity becomes more pronounced. This paper proposes new switching and calibration schemes to reduce these non-idealities. A prototype of a second order CDC employing the proposed techniques in a 0.18 mu m CMOS process achieves a 53.2 aF RMS resolution with a 1 ms conversion time. The proposed calibration technique improves the linearity of the CDC from 9.3 bits to 12.3 bits and from 10.1 bits to 13.3 bits in the unipolar and push-pull-type sensing modes, respectively, with a sensing capacitance varying from 0.5 to 3.5 pF. The CDC is also demonstrated with a real-life pressure sensor.