A Front-End Integrated Circuit Design for Tactile Sensors

This paper presents a miniature front-end integrated circuit for tactile sensors. To achieve high sensing accuracy and density, a fast capacitance-to-voltage conversion module and an area efficient ADC module with high resolution is designed. The front-end IC is implemented based on SMIC 0.18μm CMOS process technology. Simulation results show that the conversion time of the C- V converter is 1.6 μs and the input range for the circuit is from 1 pF to 4pF. The proposed single-slope ADC has a 12-bit resolution and operates at 340-MHz clock frequency, with a differential nonlinearity of -0.09/+0.02 LSB and the integral nonlinearity of -0.68/+0.26 LSB. The proposed front-end IC shows the feasibility for the miniature tactile sensors.