Дисертації з теми "Read-Out Circuits"

Neste trabalho, foi estudado a aplicação de novas heteroestruturas semicondutoras para detecção de radiação na região do infravermelho médio. Pontos quânticos de submonocamada, detectores de cascateamento quântico e pontos quânticos de InAlAs foram testados como opção para corrigir as deficiências em responsividade, corrente de escuro e temperatura de operação, comuns nas heteroestruturas convencionais baseadas em poços quânticos e pontos quânticos de InAs obtidos no regime de crescimento Stranski-Krastanov. Também foi projetado, fabricado e testado um circuito eletrônico de leitura de sinal misto para integração com matrizes de sensores e produção de imagens. Esse tipo de circuito possui uma série de vantagens em relação aos dispositivos convencionais que costumam ser completamente analógicos.
In this work, we studied the application of new types of semiconductor heterostructures for mid-infrared detection. Submonolayer quantum dots (SML-QDs), quantum-cascade detectors (QCDs) and InAlAs quantum dots were tested as an option to circumvent the common shortcomings of responsivity, dark current and operating temperature of the usual heterestructures based on quantum wells (QWs) and InAs Stranski-Krastanov quantum dots. We also designed, fabricated and tested a mixed-signal read-out circuit aiming the fabrication of focalplane arrays (FPAs) for applications to infrared imaging. This kind of architecture has several advantages over a fully analog design.

Les microphones sont des capteurs qui permettent à nos systèmes électroniques de prendre connaissance de notre environnement acoustique en fournissant un signal électrique représentatif des vibrations de l’air. Ils sont employés dans la plupart des systèmes multimédia, mais aussi dans les appareils auditifs. Dans l’implant auditif, le microphone se substitue à l’oreille humaine capable de détecter des pressions acoustiques variants de quelque μPa à quelques Pa. Les microphones, sont en général accompagnés d’un circuit électronique spécifique qui permet leur exploitation au coeur d’un système hétérogène. Depuis les toutes premières transductions acoustique-électriques, le microphone a été perfectionné avec la mise en oeuvre de nouveau principes de transduction et l’élaboration de circuit de conditionnement plus performants. Dernièrement, l’introduction de la technologie MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems) a permis de réaliser des microphones extrêmement compacts et peu couteux. Ces travaux de recherches concernent la réalisation d’un circuit électronique dédié à l’exploitation d’un transducteur M&NEMS (Micro & Nano Electro Mechanical Systems) survenant comme une évolution du MEMS. Pour commencer l’étude, le principe de transduction et l’application du microphone sont étudiés. Les circuits existants sont examinés en détail et adaptés au transducteur M&NEMS. Les résultats potentiels sont discutés et situés dans l’application. Dans un second temps, un circuit de conditionnement spécifique est proposé. Les résultats sont présentés puis le circuit électronique dédié est intégré sur silicium. Les performances des blocs fonctionnels intégrés sont mesurées et présentées
Microphones are sensors which allow gauging acoustic environment through an electric representation of vibrations in the air. They can be found in most multimedia equipment and in hearing aids. In this particular application, microphone substitutes a human ear which is able to sense pressure level of sound ranging from a μPa to few Pa. The read-out circuit of microphones converts physical signal from transducer into electronic signals that can be used in any heterogeneous system involving audio processing. Transducers of microphones have known successive generation of improvement. The latest refinement is related to the emergence of MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems) technology which is suitable to build compact sensor. This thesis explores the design of a readout-circuit using an innovative M&NEMS (Micro & Nano Electro Mechanical Systems) technology derived from MEMS. The thesis is structured beginning with review of existing circuits for M&NEMS microphone. A comparative study is reported considering the proposed technical specifications using simulations and a prototype was realized using discrete components. In the second phase, an innovative circuit was proposed as an ASIC solution targeting M&NEMS technology developed at CEA-LETI. The performance evaluation and the physical measurements of the proposed ASIC are detailed

碩士
國立高雄師範大學
電子工程學系
100
In this thesis, silicon photodiodes and read-out circuits for biomedical fluorescence detection are studied. Silicon photodiode structures are design and then the photocurrent signal is read out by a read-out circuit. Firstly, three types of silicon photodiodes are designed, They are the first type of the basic structure, the second type of the light well structure and the third type of diffraction and the light-retaining wall structure, respectively. For the three types, the measurement of current-voltage characteristics is used to analyze the photocurrent induced by shining the excitation light, violet light with a wavelength of 410 nm or so, and excited fluorescence, green light with a wavelength of 540 nm or so, on the photodiode.It is expected that the photocurrent resulting from fluorescent is much larger than that from excitation light. The excitation light is generated by a light-emitting diode (LED). Because of the material nature of silicon, the responsivity ratio of green and violet lights is not large enough that the photodiodes can be applied to fluorescence detection. Therefore, the small responsitivity ratio is improved by the structural design of fluorescence detection.By fixing the LED on the side of the photodiode and shining the analyzed fluorescent target with a certain incident angle, the excitation light is directed away from the photodiode and only fluorescence is directly shined on the photodiode. With the designed structure for fluorescent measurement, the responsitivity ratio of fluorescence and excitation light is more than 20. that which is bound with fluorophore, Devices and circuits are fabricated by using the TSMC 0.35µm CMOS BioMEMS process, which is supported by National Chip Implementation Center. The third type of photodiode is used to do the concentration detection of fluorescent material. the plot of the photocurrent versus concentration, including 6mg/ld, 8mg/ld, 10mg/ld, 12mg/ld, and 14mg/ld, is measured. As for the readout circuit, the three kinds of circuits are designed. The first kind is a circuit with a output of oscillation pulse. The discharging current of capacitors depends on the mirrored photocurrent. Output frequency is proportional to the photocurrent with a measured linearity of 0.994. The output frequency versus concentration of fluorescent material shows a linearity of 0.98. The second kind is a readout circuit of pulse width resulting from the fluorescent photocurrent charging for a fixed voltage difference. The simulated relationship of pulse width versus photocurrent shows a linearity of 0.99. The third kind is a readout circuit of pulse width resulting from the fluorescent photocurrent charging for a fixed interval and then the discharging by a fixed current. The linearity of the simulated output characteristic is 0.993.

碩士
國立臺灣大學
電機工程學研究所
93
In the recent years, due to the invention of various digital camcorders and pressure sensors which are easy to carry with DC voltages supplied by batteries, CMOS technology makes sensor more attractive than ever. Since late 90’s, Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) revolutionize the traditional ways of electrical, electronic, and mechanical engineering which have the same type of characteristics as IC. Now, this technology has even advanced to the era of wireless connection, optical communication and bio-engineering products. Using this technique, it has many advantages such as minimizing chips’ volume, low consumption of power, and low production fees. It is also widely used in sensor and driver. We can see that micro-system is the trend of future engineering field. Also, in terms of the sensors, pressure sensor has the highest growing rate in the market. This thesis has finished and developed useful pressure sensing system, calculation amplifier and status amplifier which are merged into integrated circuit. In addition, the thesis had successfully simulated using Pspice based on TSMC 0.35 um CMOS MEMS to develop capacitor- pressure sensor and read out the circuits using Pspice will be the first step of simulation. This article’s best contribution is to start up our laboratory room in order to self-design and produce analog integrated circuit which can be used in detection of low signals and construct our laboratory’s library on integrated circuits. In the future, it is usable for other designers to directly utilize this circuit to design high level analog integrated circuits.

碩士
國立臺灣大學
光電工程學研究所
107
Cytochrome c protein has been published several times for its high temperature coefficient of resistance(TCR). The high temperature coefficient of resistance of cytochrome c thin film was suitable for infrared sensing. However, its reliability is a severe problem. This paper proposes a different solution for cytochrome c protein, which enhances reliability significantly. The performance of an uncooled microbolometer is effected by TCR and thermal insulation. In this paper, we use cytochrome c protein as infrared accepter, and fabricated on the chip with inkjet printer. The chip is composed of two parts. One is detection area, the other is readout circuit. Detection area is composed of 9 pixels with suspension structure to enhance thermal insulation. Readout circuit is a serial circuit, it can read voltages on pixels one by one. The infrared sensor is fabricated by TSMC and 2 post progress. The compatibility with CMOS progress, high temperature coefficient of resistance(TCR) and enhanced reliability of cytochrome c protein solution make it possible to have a cheap, little size and sensitive uncooled infrared microbolometer. The measured voltage difference on the protein-based microbolometer with fabricated read-out integrated circuits was 0.14-1.19 Volts per 0.5°C increments. The TCR value is 29%. The responsivity value is 1.5*105 Volt/Watt. The 1/f noise value of the cytochrome c thin film was 6.83*10-5 V/Hz1/2 at 60Hz. The NETD value of pixel is calculated to be 69.4 mK. We believe that this approach provides an inexpensive and standard CMOS fabrication process to lower the high cost of microbolometers in future.

碩士
國立雲林科技大學
電子與資訊工程研究所碩士班
89
In this thesis, the principle of the MOSFET was be used for ISFET. The gate metal of the MOSFET was substituted for the insulator over the SiO2 (such as Ta2O5, Al2O3, Si3N4, a-C:H, a-Si:H…, etc..)，which must be sensitive for the H+ and OH- in the buffer solution. Reference electrode was used to supply the reference potential for the buffer solution. The threshold voltage (VT) of the ISFET will shift in the various pH buffer solutions. Hence, the pH value of the solution can be detected by the ISFET. In this thesis, the sensing films of hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) and the hydrogenated amorphous carbon (a-C:H) deposited by the plasma enhanced-low pressure chemical vapor deposition system (PE-LPCVD) were studied. There are many unstable factors to affect the applications of the pH-ISFET, especially the temperature effect, hysteresis and drift, which were aimed to study in this thesis. For the a-Si:H, the hysteresis and drift were studied. About the a-C:H, the three unstable factors would all be studied in our research. Otherwise, we found the sensitivity of the a-C:H gate pH-ISFET can be different in the various conditions of the deposition process. The relationship of the sensitivity versus the deposition conditions was focused on the gas flow, power density and deposition pressure. And the read-out circuit would be finally studied in the thesis.

碩士
國立中山大學
電機工程學系研究所
107
This thesis was driven by an MOST project, ”Rapid Quantitative Measurement System for CEA/PSA/ALKP Tumor Markers in Urine,” to develop two research topics, including an impedance estimation read-out circuit for BIA-type biomedical sensors and an impedance and phase calculation baseband circuit. Both designs are realized using TSMC 0.18 m CMOS Mixed Signal/RF Process to justify the proposed theory and method. The first design is an impedance estimation front-end read-out circuit for BIA-type biomedical sensors, which is composed of low-frequency operational amplifiers and a unity gain buffer owing to the signal frequency range of the BIA-type biomedical sensors is 100 Hz 1 MHz. To increase the design margin, the operating frequency range of the proposed circuit is deliberately selected to be 10 Hz 2 MHz. However, since it is impossible to include real of BIA-type biomedical sensors in the simulation, an equivalent model (RC Model) is constructed by capacitors and resistors to ensure the integrity of the simulated environment. The equivalent model has impedance and phase behavior very close to that of the BIA-type biosensors. The measurement results on silicon to show maximum error of 7.7 kΩ at 10 Hz, and the phase maximum error of 12 at 50 kHz. The baseband circuit calculating the impedance and phase in real time is proposed to provide a solution carrying out the estimation of the impedance and phase of the BIAtype biomedical sensors automatically. The baseband circuit is also added with functions of the instant update of real-time change of the input signal frequency. The reason is that the digital solution has a better noise rejection capability and feasibility to be integrated with other digital signal processing modules.

碩士
國立成功大學
電機工程學系
103
A combining impedance sensor and front-end read-out circuit with sigma-delta modulator (SDM) is proposed in this design. This read-out circuit is designed to measure urine Creatinine concentration, which is for diagnosis and preventing from kidney disease and urethral infection. Different Creatinine concentration will cause variation of sensor impedance. By using this front-end circuit with SDM, the Creatinine concentration will be read out and quantized in to digital signal for DSP processing. Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) is one of the measurements for measuring dielectric and transport properties of materials. EIS has become de facto standard in these years. EIS is based on sending different frequency (eg. 1 mHz~1 MHz) stimulating signal (sine and cosine wave) into impedance sensor, collecting frequency response and analyzing the result. Through this analysis, sensor impedance model can be built and approached. The main function of this front-end impedance read-out circuit is to measure urine Creatinine concentration. Therefore, different from completed EIS measurement, which built out the whole impedance model, this design base on analogue approach and realized by Lock-in Amplifier. This design fixes the approach error to fit for sensor accuracy specification. This design only requires a 100 Hz sine wave stimulating signal on sensor interface. Output signal varies in response to sensor impedance variation with its 1) amplitude variation and 2) phase variation. Passing through interface and chopper circuit, the output signal is processed and converted by second order Cascade of Resonators with Distributed Feedback (CRFB) SDM into digital signal for back-end to calculate amplitude and phase variation in response to urine Creatinine concentration is acquired. This design is implemented in TSMC 0.18 m CMOS process with 192 kHz sampling rate. The SDM measurement result shows that the SNDR is 70.25 dB, and ENOB is 11.38bits. System impedance measurement linearity is 0.9998, and phase measurement linearity is 0.9717. This design has good performance on linearity in measurement, and impedance relative error is -9.6 % to -6.8 %. But phase relative error is up to 60%. The power consumption of this design is 1.22 mW and the area of the chip is 1.224*1.222mm^2. Chip core area is 0.765*0.778mm^2. In conclusion, the impedance measurement of the proposed design can be used as a read-out circuit of Creatinine for the diagnosis of kidney diseases and urinary tract infection.

碩士
輔仁大學
電子工程學系
90
A novel CMOS readout circuit with time-delay-integration (TDI) is proposed. Using the technique, the signal-to-noise ratio can be improved. A cell failure testing circuit is applied in the design. The faulty diodes are detected. Then the current paths of the faulty diodes are cut off by the testing circuit. Thus the operation of the readout circuit is not affected by the faulty diodes. For long-wave and low-temperature infrared signal application, the readout circuit increases the detecting range by scanning the object. Moreover, the circuit structure is very simple. The device noise and power dissipation can be reduced. The readout circuit designed and fabricated by 0.35μm 1P4M n-well CMOS technology has been measurement. The power consumption of whole chip is 100mW at 3.3V power supply. The chip area is 2000×1800μm2.

碩士
國立彰化師範大學
機電工程學系
98
Recently, because of the rise of MEMS, ISFET becomes more important. Read-out circuit of ISFET is the key for its application. The objective of this thesis is how to improve the efficacy of ion-sensitive field-effect transistor (ISFET) gas read-out circuit. All of the research process such as sensing theory, architecture of the system chip, read-out circuit design and simulation and layout of the system chip are included in the thesis. The layout design and the circuit simulation are used the SPICE model of TSMC 0.35μm 2P4M 3.3V process. First, we design a rail-to-rail operation amplifier with output feedback. Then several rail-to-rail operation amplifiers combine to form a novel ISFET read-out circuit which can apply to gas sensing. The gate of ISFET extended to sensor structure, and the other parts of ISFET included in the read-out circuit. In order to detect gas concentrations, the sensor structure is coated with the sensing film. The variation of gas concentrations can be converted into voltage variation by the read-out circuit and then the signal can be read easily. However, traditional ISFET read-out circuit is very susceptible to common mode noise impact, which will cause output value instability and in turn affect the accuracy. In this thesis, the read-out circuit is divided into sensing phase and reset phase. Then we connect the back-end with correlated double sampling circuit, so as to read different phases of the output. Finally, the two signals deducted each other by subtraction circuit, and we can obtain the steady output voltage. It reduces the condition impact of temperature on the output through the novel ISFET read-out circuit. The voltage variation decrease from 74.2μV to 16.6μV, and change output into linear state that helps signal to read. Additionally, the circuit towards the current instability in the resistibility is excellent and so that it increases the output stability. The voltage variation decreases from 7.74mV to 4.2μV.

碩士
國立中央大學
電機工程學系
104
With the popularity of the wireless transmission technology and the Internet, the portable electronic products are the mainstream in the market. In recent years, the portable products with the bio-signal acquisition have been applied in daily monitoring and healthcare. Through the sensor detects the heartbeat, muscle and other data of the human, then transmit the bio-signal data to different system interfaces. In order to completely amplify the tiny bio-signal and apply in portable devices, the circuit design is required to be low noise and low power consumption. This thesis presents a design of read-out circuit for bio-signal detection. AC coupling structure is employed to block the DC offset which is caused by the electrode. The MOS operates in weak inversion to reduce noise and power consumption. Besides, the circuit uses the pseudo resistor to achieve the low-cutoff frequency pole, and also affords programmable gain and bandwidth for different bio-signal to avoid the saturation situation. The circuit is implemented by TSMC TN90GUTM CMOS 1P9M process and the chip area is 0.437 mm2 (including the PAD). Power consumption is about 8.96 μW for 1 V power supply (bias circuit is included) and application bandwidth is 10 KHz. When the input signal frequency is 250Hz, the gain of the circuit can achieve 57.6、53.2、47.3 dB in three different amplitudes (0.3 mV, 0.5 mV, 1 mV). The low-cutoff frequency pole is 12.2 Hz. The input-referred noise is 20.5 μVrms (11 Hz – 10 KHz) and the NEF is 20.98.

碩士
國立聯合大學
電子工程學系碩士班
101
In the thesis, the improved OP-based potentiostat with the glucose test strip electrode readout the electronic signal related to the concentration of Glucose is proposed. The cascode differential (Telescopic) amplifier with miller frequency compensation is designed the operational amplifier (OPA) to implement the potentiostat that the performance of OPA has 94.7496 dB gain and 57.82 phase margin stable range is analyzed and improved. The CMOS circuit of potentiostat is successfully designed and simulated by HSPICE. The IC chip was fabricated by TSMC 0.35μm and through the coordinated LabVIEW programming the test schedule with GPIB interface to measure the functions and the characteristics. The optimal performances will directly influence to oxidation-reduction reaction through the cyclic voltammetry is applied on the three-electrode. The instrumentation amplifier (IA) with the higher noise immunity capability is designed to improve the measurement accuracy compare with OP-based potentiostat for glucose bio-sensor. The simulations and experiment results show that the potentiostat is produced more linearity output range corresponding to the measured concentration of glucose from 0.1 mg/dl to 1.8957 mg/dl range. The architecture of the potentiostat can be intergraded and fabricated for VLSI design to verify the operation of glucose bio-sensor. There is a great potential in the portable bio-detection system for the health-care and bio-medicine applications.