High-Power-Efficiency Readout Circuit Employing Average Capacitance-to-Voltage Converter for Micro-Electro-Mechanical System Capacitive Accelerometers.

A capacitance-to-voltage converter (CVC) is proposed in this paper and applied to a readout circuit for a micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) accelerometer to improve the power efficiency. In a traditional readout circuit, the front-end CVC has to operate at a high sampling frequency to resist thermal noise deterioration due to the large parasitic capacitance introduced by the mechanical sensing element. Thus, the back-end analog-to-digital converter (ADC) also has to operate at a high sampling frequency to avoid noise aliasing when sampling the output signal of the CVC, which leads to high power consumption. The average CVC technique is proposed in this paper to reduce the sampling frequency requirement of the back-end ADC and thus reduce the power consumption. Both the traditional readout circuit and the proposed readout circuit are simulated with a commercial 0.18 µm BCD process. The simulation results show that noise aliasing occurs, and the noise power spectral density (PSD) of the traditional readout circuit increases by 12 dB when the sampling frequency of back-end ADC is reduced by 24 dB. However, in the proposed readout circuit, a noise aliasing effect does not occur. Moreover, the proposed readout circuit reduces the power consumption by 53% without thermal noise deterioration. In addition, the proposed CVC circuits are fabricated in an 0.18 µm BCD process, and the test results show that the presented readout circuit based on the average CVC technique can obtain better performance than the traditional CVC-based readout circuit.

[A Time-Spatial Resolvable High Speed Spectrograph and Its Application on Spectrum Measurement of a Nanosecond Pulsed Underwater Spark Discharge].

Recently, the diagnosis of the characteristic of pulsed underwater electrical discharges plasma have received significant attention. The measurement of a time-spatial resolved spectrum emitted from a single discharge pulse is important for understanding the time-spatial evolution characteristics of plasma generated by a pulsed high-voltage discharge in water. In this paper, a high speed time-spatial resolvable spectrograph for measuring the emission spectrum of a single electrical discharge pulse was reported. The high speed time-spatial resolvable spectrograph has been constructed by combining an ultrahigh-speed frame camera system with monochromator. Software for the spectral analyzing was also developed. The performance of the spectrograph was tested by using a 632.8 nm He-Ne laser beam at a 1 200 g x mm(-1) grating. The pixel resolution for 632.8 nm spectra is 0.013 nm. The instrument broadening for 632.8 nm spectra is (0.150 ± 0.009)nm when the exposure.time of the camera is 20 ns and the width of entrance slit is 0.2 mm, and increases with increasing the slit width. The change of exposure time of the camera has no influence on the instrument broadening, ensuring the spectrograph in a steady performance while adjusting the exposure time of the camera. With the spectrograph, time-spatial resolved spectra emitted from a single discharge pulse of an underwater nanoseconds spark discharge were obtained. It provides good data for investigating the time-spatial evolution characteristics of the discharge plasma during a single discharge pulse. The spectrograph developed in this work provides a technical approach for studying the time-spatial evolution characteristic of, plasma generated by a single electrical discharge pulse.