Monolithic 3D Wafer Level Integration: Applied for Smart LED Wafer Level Packaging

A Power-Efficient Readout for Wheatstone-Bridge Sensors With COTS Components

This paper presents a direct digital converter for Wheatstone bridge sensors, which is realized with commercial off-the-shelf components. The power efficiency of the readout is enhanced by embedding the bridge sensor in a second-order continuous-time sigma-delta modulator (CTDeltaSigmaM). By directly digitizing the output signal of a Wheatstone...

Integrated Temperature Sensors based on Heat Diffusion

This thesis describes the theory, design and implementation of a new class of integrated temperature sensors, based on heat diffusion. In such sensors, temperature is sensed by measuring the time it takes for heat to diffuse through silicon. An on-chip thermal delay can be determined by geometry and the thermal diffusivity of silicon, and since...

A 30 ppm < 80 nJ Ring-Down-Based Readout Circuit for Resonant Sensors

This paper presents an energy-efficient readout circuit for micro-machined resonant sensors. It operates by briefly exciting the sensor at a frequency close to its resonance frequency, after which resonance frequency and quality factor are determined from a single ring-down transient. The circuit employs an inverter-based trans-impedance...

A Gm-C Continuous-Time Sigma-Delta Modulator with Improved Linearity

Bridge sensors are widely used for accurate measurement of physical quantities such as temperature, pressure, strain or altitude. Such sensors require a low-noise, high-resolution and accurate readout system with high input impedance. In order to meet these requirements, conventional sensor readout systems use multiple stages which typically...