Sensor Signal Conditioning - An IC Designer´s Perspective

The characteristics of analog integrated circuits have been steadily improving over the post decade due at least in part to innovative design techniques. Many of these techniques are quite general in nature and can be applied to a wide variety of circuits. Integrated sensor systems (i.e. sensors and electronics on a single chip or multi-chip hybrids) are good candidates for exploiting such advances in analog integrated circuit design, This paper illustrates by specific examples how the signal conditioning circuitry required by most sensors can benefit from techniques like dynamic offset correction, self-calibration, device averaging, and laser trimming.