Neuromorphic capacitive tactile sensors inspired by slowly adaptive mechanoreceptors

The sense of touch is essential in our everyday life as it allows us to interact with our environment. The same applies to robots and users of prostheses but requires sensing solutions that are power efficient and allow edge and embedded computation. In this paper, we present a capacitive, neuromorphic, event-driven, tactile sensor. The mixed-mode subthreshold circuit is implemented in 180nm technology and achieves a sensitivity of ≈ 30Hz/N in simulation with the SPICE simulation platform spectre.