A 90 μW continuous-time front-end with 10b SAR-ADC for capacitive MEMS accelerometers

This paper presents a low power read-out front-end for 3-axis MEMS capacitive accelerometer. The front-end includes the analog preamplifier (to sense the signal coming from the MEMS) and a Successive-Approximation 10b A/D Converter, for digitalization and off-chip digital-signal-processing. Power minimization is achieved by using a continuous-time sensing preamplifier (i.e. constant-charge capacitance-to-voltage conversion) and SAR-ADC with bridge capacitive reduction. Preamplifier programmable in-band gain allows to accommodate different MEMS sensitivities. A very high-impedance MOS transistor is used for MEMS biasing, thus providing very low frequency (<1 Hz) AC coupling. In a 0.13 μm CMOS technology, the full channel consumes 90 μW from a single 1.2 V supply voltage, and achieves an equivalent 67.9 dBFull-Scale@SNR in [1 Hz–4 kHz] bandwidth by exploiting oversampling ratio.