CMOS Amperometric ADC With High Sensitivity, Dynamic Range and Power Efficiency for Air Quality Monitoring

Airborne pollutants are a leading cause of illness and mortality globally. Electrochemical gas sensors show great promise for personal air quality monitoring to address this worldwide health crisis. However, implementing miniaturized arrays of such sensors demands high performance instrumentation circuits that simultaneously meet challenging power, area, sensitivity, noise and dynamic range goals. This paper presents a new multi-channel CMOS amperometric ADC featuring pixel-level architecture for gas sensor arrays. The circuit combines digital modulation of input currents and an incremental ΣΔ ADC to achieve wide dynamic range and high sensitivity with very high power efficiency and compact size. Fabricated in 0.5 μm CMOS, the circuit was measured to have 164 dB cross-scale dynamic range, 100 fA sensitivity while consuming only 241 μW and 0.157 mm
²
active area per channel. Electrochemical experiments with liquid and gas targets demonstrate the circuit's real-time response to a wide range of analyte concentrations.