A Low-Power Low-Noise Dual-Chopper Amplifier for Capacitive CMOS-MEMS Accelerometers

This paper reports a novel dual-chopper amplifier (DCA) and its application to monolithic complementary metal-oxide semiconductor-microelectromechanical systems accelerometers. The DCA design minimizes the power consumption and noise by chopping the sensing signals at two clocks. The first clock is a high frequency for removing the flicker noise while the second clock is a significantly lower frequency to keep the unit gain bandwidth low. A monolithic three-axis accelerometer integrated with the DCA on the same chip has been successfully fabricated using a post-CMOS micromachining process. The measured noise floors are 40 μ g/√Hz in the
x
- and
y
-axis and 130 μ g/√Hz in the
z
-axis, and the power consumption is about 1 mW per axis.