A low power Sigma-Delta Modulator in an advanced 22 nm FDSOI CMOS Process for sensor applications

Sensors are indispensable components of many smart systems that are used in various scientific and industrial applications such as automation, intelligent energy management, smart grids, automotive, and many more. Especially, the growing significance of the Internet of Things (IoT), has led to an increasing demand of power-efficient smart sensor systems in the market. Many sensor systems require medium-to-high resolution data conversion of signals with bandwidths that are in the range of DC to a few kHz. Sigma- Delta (SigmaDelta) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are particularly suitable for such applications because of their ability to achieve high resolution in this frequency range of interest. The main workhorse of the SigmaDelta ADC is the SigmaDelta modulator. The SigmaDelta modulator oversamples the incoming analog signal and shapes the quantization noise such that a large portion of the noise power accumulates outside the bandwidth of interest. The out-of-band noise is subsequently filtered-out with a digital decimation filter. Therefore, a good design of the SigmaDelta modulator is crucial in determining the overall performance of the SigmaDelta ADC.