Concurrent Acquisition Approach for High Resolution Sensor Arrays

An increasing amount of sensor applications require multiple data acquisition with high resolution in truly parallel fashion. This requirement is particularly useful in the field of Nanotechnology where concurrent acquisition is required to understand the correlation between weak stochastic events. In this paper, we will propose a sensor array readout approach where synchronous sigma-delta converters are interfacing each sensing point and whose outputs are concurrently downsampled by dedicated hardware for decimation processing. The approach shows the following advantages: on the one hand the sigma-delta conversion ensures high resolution and linearity (>12 bits), on the other, the 1-bit output allows easier routing access to the array. The approach is particularly useful in the presence of very low signals where direct raster-mode switching access to the array would compromise the signal-to-noise ratio of the readout process. As a proof of this concept, the approach is applied to an array of lipid bilayer membranes (BLMs) permitting to acquire and display single molecule event data by means of a PC-based graphical user interface (GUI).