A 1.2V 900nW conductance converter

This article describes a new electrical conductance converter method suitable for very low power applications, where energy constraints prevails over speed and measurement accuracy. Method idea gather voltage time integration and shopper stabilization techniques to process noisy low amplitude signals and to overcome severe limitations of weak inversion channel CMOS circuitry. Main features and tradeoffs are exploited. A 1.2V ASIC implementation on standard 0.35μm CMOS schematics is also presented. Post-layout simulations shows a total power consumption lower than 900nW including current source excitation inherent to the conductance measurement. Such low power consumption allows the measurement of several physical parameters on self-powered wireless networks.