A High-Performance Digital Interface Circuit for a High-Q Micro-Electromechanical System Accelerometer

Micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) accelerometers are widely used in the inertial navigation and nanosatellites field. A high-performance digital interface circuit for a high-Q MEMS micro-accelerometer is presented in this work. The mechanical noise of the MEMS accelerometer is decreased by the a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Xiangyu Li, Jianping Hu, Xiaowei Liu
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2018-12-01
Series:Micromachines
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2072-666X/9/12/675
Description
Summary:Micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) accelerometers are widely used in the inertial navigation and nanosatellites field. A high-performance digital interface circuit for a high-Q MEMS micro-accelerometer is presented in this work. The mechanical noise of the MEMS accelerometer is decreased by the application of a vacuum-packaged sensitive element. The quantization noise in the baseband of the interface circuit is greatly suppressed by a 4th-order loop shaping. The digital output is attained by the interface circuit based on a low-noise front-end charge-amplifier and a 4th-order Sigma-Delta (&#931;&#916;) modulator. The stability of high-order &#931;&#916; was studied by the root locus method. The gain of the integrators was reduced by using the proportional scaling technique. The low-noise front-end detection circuit was proposed with the correlated double sampling (CDS) technique to eliminate the 1/<i>f</i> noise and offset. The digital interface circuit was implemented by 0.35 &#956;m complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology. The high-performance digital accelerometer system was implemented by double chip integration and the active interface circuit area was about 3.3 mm &#215; 3.5 mm. The high-Q MEMS accelerometer system consumed 10 mW from a single 5 V supply at a sampling frequency of 250 kHz. The micro-accelerometer system could achieve a third harmonic distortion of &#8722;98 dB and an average noise floor in low-frequency range of less than &#8722;140 dBV; a resolution of 0.48 &#956;g/Hz<sup>1/2</sup> (@300 Hz); a bias stability of 18 &#956;g by the Allen variance program in MATLAB.
ISSN:2072-666X