An Analog Front-End for a Multifunction Sensor Employing a Weak-Inversion Biasing Technique With 26 nVrms, 25 aCrms, and 19 fArms Input-Referred Noise

Abstract

An analog front-end (AFE) for a multifunction environmental sensor is proposed. The AFE is designed to be able to sense 1 μV, 1 fC, and 1 pA level signals in a low-frequency band around DC, and consists of an instrumentation amplifier (IA), a charge amplifier (CA), and a continuous time delta-sigma (CTΔΣ) ADC. To reduce the low-frequency noise of operational amplifier (OPAMP) which is used for signal path, this paper proposes a weak-inversion biasing technique. The designed IA achieved 26 nVrms input-referred noise (IRN) in the band of 0.1-10 Hz with 0.22 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> die area. The designed CA achieved 25 aCrms IRN in charge sensing mode and 19 fArms IRN in current sensing mode in the band of 0.01-1 Hz, respectively, and occupies 0.12 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> die area. The AFE has been fabricated in a 0.18 μm CMOS process with 4.5 mm2 die area. The current consumption at 2.56 kHz output data rate (ODR) is 2.5 mA, reducing to 2 μA at 0.01 Hz ODR.