Search for Articles:
Title / Keyword
Author / Affiliation / Email
Journal
Article Type
 
 
Advanced Search
 
Section
Special Issue
Volume
Issue
Number
Page
 
6.8
3.9
Journals
Sensors
Special Issues
Advanced Interface Circuits for Sensor Systems (Volume II)
sensors-logo
Submit to Special Issue Submit Abstract to Special Issue Review for Sensors Propose a Special Issue

Journal Menu

► Journal Menu

Journal Browser

► Journal Browser
share announcement

Advanced Interface Circuits for Sensor Systems (Volume II)

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Electronic Sensors".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 July 2024 | Viewed by 2704

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Pak Kwong Chan

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
Interests: sensor interface ICs; smart sensor systems; low-energy low-noise circuit design; sensor power management ICs; PVT-insensitive circuits and systems
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Holden King-Ho Li

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
Interests: MEMS sensors; MOEMS sensors; CMOS-MEMS integration; sensor reliability and long term performance; sensor design for manufacturability
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Sensors are widely used in healthcare, automobiles, consumer electronics, industrial applications, and so forth. These industries expect high-quality and intelligent sensor circuits. In an era of digital technology, digital-aware or software-aware sensor circuits are a major design agenda. With the combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) as one of the driving forces, this has posed further design criteria and constraints to the interface circuits that aim to enhance the detection capability through the assistance of AI. It turns out that the interface circuits, which may be coupled with intelligent peripheral support circuits, can provide advanced features to meet high-performance-aware specifications or high-adaptability, etc., and, therefore, realize smart functions through smart program control. These design concerns impose design challenges and cause a paradigm shift in the design approach to designers or researchers in this emerging field. This Special Issue will publish papers that explore the potential solutions to tackle these issues. Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

  • High-performance interface circuits
  • AI–IoT sensor circuit design and techniques
  • Smart power management circuits for sensors
  • Sensor circuits with configurable architectures
  • Intelligent peripheral circuits for sensor circuits
  • Software for sensor circuits
  • Digital-assisted sensor circuits
  • Data communication for sensor circuits

For your reference, you may refer to publications in Volume I of this Special Issue series.

Dr. Pak Kwong Chan
Dr. Holden King-Ho Li
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sensors is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • readout circuits
  • interface circuit techniques
  • AI-IoT
  • power management
  • system architectures
  • sensor peripheral circuits
  • data communication
  • digital-assisted design
  • software-assisted design

Published Papers (4 papers)

Download All Papers
Order results
Result details
Show export options expand_more Show export options expand_less
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

14 pages, 2451 KiB  
Article
Hardware Acceleration of Digital Pulse Shape Analysis Using FPGAs
by César González, Mariano Ruiz, Antonio Carpeño, Alejandro Piñas, Daniel Cano-Ott, Julio Plaza, Trino Martinez and David Villamarin
Sensors 2024, 24(9), 2724; https://doi.org/10.3390/s24092724 - 25 Apr 2024
Viewed by 293
Abstract
The BC501A sensor is a liquid scintillator frequently used in nuclear physics for detecting fast neutrons. This paper describes a hardware implementation of digital pulse shape analysis (DPSA) for real-time analysis. DPSA is an algorithm that extracts the physically relevant parameters from the [...] Read more.
The BC501A sensor is a liquid scintillator frequently used in nuclear physics for detecting fast neutrons. This paper describes a hardware implementation of digital pulse shape analysis (DPSA) for real-time analysis. DPSA is an algorithm that extracts the physically relevant parameters from the detected BC501A signals. The hardware solution is implemented in a MicroTCA system that provides the physical, mechanical, electrical, and cooling support for an AMC board (NAMC-ZYNQ-FMC) with a Xilinx ZYNQ Ultrascale-MP SoC. The Xilinx FPGA programmable logic implements a JESD204B interface to high-speed ADCs. The physical and datalink JESD204B layers are implemented using hardware description language (HDL), while the Xilinx high-level synthesis language (HLS) is used for the transport and application layers. The DPSA algorithm is a JESD204B application layer that includes a FIR filter and a constant fraction discriminator (CFD) function, a baseline calculation function, a peak detection function, and an energy calculation function. This architecture achieves an analysis mean time of less than 100 µs per signal with an FPGA resource utilization of about 50% of its most used resources. This paper presents a high-performance DPSA embedded system that interfaces with a 1 GS/s ADC and performs accurate calculations with relatively low latency. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Interface Circuits for Sensor Systems (Volume II))
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

24 pages, 4805 KiB  
Article
Efficient and Accurate Analog Voltage Measurement Using a Direct Sensor-to-Digital Port Interface for Microcontrollers and Field-Programmable Gate Arrays
by Marco Grossi
Sensors 2024, 24(3), 873; https://doi.org/10.3390/s24030873 - 29 Jan 2024
Viewed by 640
Abstract
Portable sensor systems are usually based on microcontrollers and/or Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) that are interfaced with sensors by means of an Analog-to-Digital converter (ADC), either integrated in the computing device or external. An alternative solution is based on the direct connection of [...] Read more.
Portable sensor systems are usually based on microcontrollers and/or Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) that are interfaced with sensors by means of an Analog-to-Digital converter (ADC), either integrated in the computing device or external. An alternative solution is based on the direct connection of the sensors to the digital input port of the microcontroller or FPGA. This solution is particularly interesting in the case of devices not integrating an internal ADC or featuring a small number of ADC channels. In this paper, a technique is presented to directly interface sensors with analog voltage output to the digital input port of a microcontroller or FPGA. The proposed method requires only a few passive components and is based on the measurements of the duty cycle of a digital square-wave signal. This technique was investigated by means of circuit simulations using LTSpice and was implemented in a commercial low-cost FPGA device (Gowin GW1NR-9). The duty cycle of the square-wave signal features a good linear correlation with the analog voltage to be measured. Thus, a look-up table to map the analog voltage values to the measured duty cycle is not required with benefits in terms of memory occupation. The experimental results on the FPGA device have shown that the analog voltage can be measured with a maximum accuracy of 1.09 mV and a sampling rate of 9.75 Hz. The sampling rate can be increased to 31.35 Hz and 128.31 Hz with an accuracy of 1.61 mV and 2.68 mV, respectively. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Interface Circuits for Sensor Systems (Volume II))
►▼ Show Figures

Graphical abstract

13 pages, 2056 KiB  
Article
Two Proposals of a Simple Analog Conditioning Circuit for Remote Resistive Sensors with a Three-Wire Connection
by Ferran Reverter
Sensors 2024, 24(2), 422; https://doi.org/10.3390/s24020422 - 10 Jan 2024
Viewed by 506
Abstract
This article proposes and experimentally characterizes two implementations of a novel front-end circuit for three-wire connected resistive sensors with a wire-resistance compensation. The first implementation relies on two twin diodes, whereas the second on a switch; in both cases, those devices are non-remote [...] Read more.
This article proposes and experimentally characterizes two implementations of a novel front-end circuit for three-wire connected resistive sensors with a wire-resistance compensation. The first implementation relies on two twin diodes, whereas the second on a switch; in both cases, those devices are non-remote (i.e., they are placed at the circuit end). The two circuit proposals have a square-wave input excitation so that a constant current with the two polarities is alternatively generated. Then, depending on that polarity, the current goes through either the sensor and the wire parasitic resistances or just the parasitic resistances. This generates a square-wave bipolar output signal whose average value, which is obtained by a low-pass filter, is proportional to the sensor resistance and only depends on the mismatch between two of the three wire resistances involved. Experimental tests applied to resistances related to a Pt100 thermal sensor show a remarkable linearity. For example, the switch-based front-end circuit offers a non-linearity error lower than 0.01% full-scale span, and this is practically insensitive to both the presence and the mismatch between the wire resistances. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Interface Circuits for Sensor Systems (Volume II))
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

20 pages, 8551 KiB  
Article
Design of a 0.5 V Chopper-Stabilized Differential Difference Amplifier for Analog Signal Processing Applications
by Xinlan Fan, Feifan Gao and Pak Kwong Chan
Sensors 2023, 23(24), 9808; https://doi.org/10.3390/s23249808 - 13 Dec 2023
Viewed by 798
Abstract
This paper presents a low-voltage low-power chopper-stabilized differential difference amplifier (DDA) realized using 40 nm CMOS technology. Operating with a supply voltage of 0.5 V, a three-stage DDA has been employed to achieve an open-loop gain of 89 dB, while consuming just 0.74 [...] Read more.
This paper presents a low-voltage low-power chopper-stabilized differential difference amplifier (DDA) realized using 40 nm CMOS technology. Operating with a supply voltage of 0.5 V, a three-stage DDA has been employed to achieve an open-loop gain of 89 dB, while consuming just 0.74 μW of power. The proposed DDA incorporates feed-forward frequency compensation and a Type II compensator to achieve pole-zero cancellation and damping factor control. The DDA has a unity-gain bandwidth (UGB) of 170 kHz, a phase margin (PM) of 63.98°, and a common-mode rejection ratio (CMRR) of up to 100 dB. This circuit can effectively drive a 50 pF capacitor in parallel with a 300 kΩ resistor. The use of the chopper stabilization technique effectively mitigates the offset and 1/f noise. The chopping frequency of the chopper modulator is 5 kHz. The input noise is 245 nV/sqrt (Hz) at 1 kHz, and the input-referred offset under Monte Carlo cases is only 0.26 mV. Such a low-voltage chopper-stabilized DDA will be very useful for analog signal processing applications. Compared to the reported chopper DDA counterparts, the proposed DDA is regarded as that with one of the lowest supply voltages. The proposed DDA has demonstrated its effectiveness in tradeoff design when dealing with multiple parameters pertaining to power consumption, noise, and bandwidth. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Interface Circuits for Sensor Systems (Volume II))
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

Show export options expand_more Show export options expand_less
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:
 
Displaying articles 1-4
Back to TopTop