Integrated Electrostatic RMS-to-DC Converter Using IC-Compatible Surface Micromachining

One of the important parameters of the output signal of an electronic sensor is the RMS value. A compatible surface-micromachining postprocessing module can be combined with a bifet electronic process DIMES01 to integrate a micromachined electrostatic RMS-to-DC converter with read-out electronics in one single chip. The electrostatic RMS-to-DC converter has a high bandwidth compared with full electronic converters and has a higher input impedance than thermal converters. The fabrication consist of a standard micro-electronic process, followed by the processing of a surface-micromachining module, which builds the mechanical structure on the wafer surface.