A Closed-Loop Architecture with Digital Output for Convective Accelerometers

We study thermal convective accelerometers manufactured on a low-cost standard CMOS technology. As a closed-loop conditioning approach, we applied the thermal sigma-delta modulation principle to the readout of these sensors. This design leads to a simple architecture with minimized analog electronics. In this work, we consider the design of an improved sensor and analyze its properties. We show that quantization noise shaping is rather poor and analyze how it is influenced by the sensing cell design.