Welcome to the home page of LVSensor. In this project, we designed, taped out, and tested a low-power humidity and temperature sensor front end in TSMC 65-nm technology. We would like to thank Prof. Kinget for his guidance and Apple for funding this course. Also, we would appreciate the help from TAs.

This project can be finished by a group of 3 in two semesters. You can learn system-level design (System model, noise analysis, stability analysis, etc.) and many key building blocks in analog circuit design (amplifier, comparator, VCO, etc).

Our chip can operate under 0.9V supply voltage and consumes a current of 5 uA. It provides a high linearity measurement for a resistor and capacitor. In this project, we implemented it into humidity capacitive and temperature resistive sensor read-out circuits.

Sensor readout ICs for internet-of-things (IoT) systems use resistive or capacitive transducers to sense temperature, humidity, pressure or strain. Conventionally, a dedicated capacitance-to-digital converter (CDC) and resistance-to-digital converter (RDC) is used for specific resistive or capacitive transducers. To combine resistance and capacitance sensing, reconfigurable R&C-to-digital converters (RCDC) that multiplex R&C sensors with a shared front end, have been proposed. However, these RCDCs still fall short of achieving the linearity and energy efficiency of standalone RDCs or CDCs. In this work, we design a reconfigurable R&C sensor interface that greatly improve the performance of linearity and energy efficiency compared with state-of-the-art R&C sensor interfaces.