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  4. A Robust Capacitive Digital Read-Out Circuit for a Scalable Tactile Skin
 
research article

A Robust Capacitive Digital Read-Out Circuit for a Scalable Tactile Skin

Damilano, Alessia
•
Ros, Paolo Motto
•
Sanginario, Alessandro
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2017
IEEE Sensors Journal

This paper presents a robust, capacitive digital read-out circuit (ROC) for sensitive skin applications in humanoid robots. The ROC can be calibrated to null the parasitic effects of transducer variation due to physical assembly. A prototype is fabricated in a 130 nm RFCMOS process, with an active area of 221x79 mu m(2) and 1.84 mu W power consumption at V-DD = 1.2V and 1ms read-out rate. The ROC output is robust to V-DD and temperature variations in a range | Delta V-DD| <= 20% and (25-53) degrees C. Furthermore, it can provide up to 200mV(pp) power supply sine wave rejection in the range 50Hz-5MHz at V-DD = 1.1V, for an output standard deviation lower than one LSB. Owing to its features and its digital modularity, the ROC was co-designed with a scalable and modular Multi-Walled Carbon NanoTube (MW-CNT) Nano composite transducer, to achieve tunable output sensitivity by adjusting the sensor nominal capacitance and the reference capacitance. The maximum sensitivity of 5.23 fF per LSB was reached when both match. The ROC was then validated with the MW-CNT nanocomposite sensor which exhibits a piecewise behaviour. 5.3 and 7.1 ENOB were extrapolated in the low-load and medium-load regions, respectively. Besides the major advantage of tunable sensitivity, the presented ROC features the lowest acquisition time and one of the most compact sizes among the state-of-the-art ROCs. Moreover, process voltage and temperature (PVT) robust output and ultra-low power consumption make this solution very attractive to replicate human physiology at robotic-level.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1109/Jsen.2017.2681065
Web of Science ID

WOS:000399767900013

Author(s)
Damilano, Alessia
Ros, Paolo Motto
Sanginario, Alessandro
Chiolerio, Alessandro
Bocchini, Sergio
Roppolo, Ignazio
Pirri, Candido Fabrizio
Carrara, Sandro  
Demarchi, Danilo
Crepaldi, Marco
Date Issued

2017

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Published in
IEEE Sensors Journal
Volume

17

Issue

9

Start page

2682

End page

2695

Subjects

Relative count detection

•

robotic skin

•

all-digital read-out circuit

•

multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MW-CNTs)

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LSI1  
Available on Infoscience
May 30, 2017
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/137905
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