A High Sensitively CMOS Preamplifier for Silicon Microphone

Industrial Technology Research Institute

In this paper, a high sensitivity CMOS preamplifier that is specified for the use of silicon microphone is proposed. Testing and measurement the circuit with MEMS microphone sensor device had already done. The high sensitivity circuit is achieved without using the transimpedance source follower. On the other hand, the output signal of the preamplifier will not be degraded and the sensitivity would be increased. The measurement results show that the proposed high sensitivity CMOS preamplifier has better performance in SNR than conventional preamplifiers. The circuit is realized in TSMC 0.35ptm CMOS technology and consumed 1.4mW under a +2.5V power supply. The core size is 55x60um2.

Abstract

easier, which alternatively achieve the implement of SoC. The organization of this paper is as follows. The conventional architecture of preamplifier for silicon microphone and the CMOS preamplifier is described in Section II. Then in Section III, test and measurements are demonstrated. Finally, the conclusion is provided in Section IV.
The readout circuit needed to operate a condenser microphone is in principle only a buffering circuit, witch acting as a transimpedance to convert the very high microphone output impedance. However, the output signal of a buffer is normally very small and it may cause problems for following besides the applications. Hence, transimpedance circuit, a preamplifier should be applied to amplify the signal to an acceptable prospect for the convenience of proceeding signal processing. A block diagram of the preamplifier circuit structure is in Fig. 1.
Vsensor

Circuit Structure

With the progress of integrated circuit process, the sizes of electronic products advance much smaller. While the speedy shrink of electronic products, the ECM' s which is constantly applied in consumer electronic products are not size down accordingly thus obstruct the microminiaturization of consumer electronic products, such as mobile phones. The use of MEMS microphone is a solution to the enormous sizes of ECM's. While applying silicon microphone, a preamplifier should be adopted to amplify the tiny signal sensed by the sensor for the proceeding signal processing. Typical preamplifiers are constructed with JFET's or BJT's as transimpedance circuits or differential input pairs but they introduce the difficulties to combine with following systems. Today, CMOS technologies allow the realization of data acquisition functional blocks such as continuous time or switched-capacitor filters, sample and hold amplifiers, and analog-to-digital converters. Therefore, the use of CMOS preamplifier makes the combination of preamplifier and proceeding system much

Introduction

Fig. 1. Block diagram of the preamplifier

A typical implementation of a preamplifier is shown in Fig.2. Fig.2(a) shows the PMOS implementation while the NMOS one is shown in Fig.2(b). Using source follower fulfils the requirements of high input impedance and low output one. The gain of which is

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(1)
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Fig. 3 Input Stage of the proposed preamplifier

Rs

(b)

Fig. 2 (a) The PMOS (b) NMOS source-follower preamplifier

The source follower has high input impedancead low output impedance, which is an ideal circuit structure for transimpedance needs. But it comes with the cost of slightly signal degradation. Equation (1) shows the gain of the buffering circuit and topically lees than 0.8v/v. The signal sensed by the sensing device is relatively small, furthermore, with the degradation of the buffering circuit, the sensitivity and immunization to noise will be greatly reduced. In the following, we described a CMOS preamplifier for silicon condenser microphone witch avoided the source follower circuit and achieved a high sensitively.

Fig.3 shows the input stage of the proposed high sensitivity CMOS preamplifier. MI 1, M12 are small transistors working in the subthreshold range as a very high resister to bias the sensor Cmin. The input impedance is so high that can achieve the frequency requirement. Transistor M2 and M4 are composed as a current source with a bias voltage VBIAS. The high sensitivity CMOS preamplifier is shown in Fig.4. Transistors M8 M9 is constructed in common drain configuration to achieve low output impedance. M5, M6, and M7 function as current sources. Cc forms a low-pass filter with R2 to filter out unnecessary high frequency signals. The total gain, Av, of the preamplifier is
AV
=

R2 + (R

R)(

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roI2)roI8

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(2)

And (2) can be simplified as

Avx 1 +RI R2
(3)

Equation (3) indicates that the key factor to the gain is the ratio between RI and R2. In this way, the influence of process drift can be kept
minimized.

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Fig. 5 Schematic of the electrical and acoustical test system

Fig. 4 Schematic of the high sensitivity CMOS

preamplifier

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The high sensitivity CMOS preamplifier with condenser sensor was tested using the electrical and acoustical test system which is shown in Fig. 5. The measurement procedure is as follows: 1. First, use B&K4231 sound level calibrator to calibrate reference microphone, which is a free field microphone (G.R.A.S 40AC) in anechoic box to make sure that the reference microphone can response the correct sound pressure level (SPL). 2. To calibrate the mouth simulator (B&K 4227) with the reference microphone in l.in anechoic box. To emit a sound of 1Hz, Pa (94db SPL). 3. Equalized the output curve of the mouth simulator to compensate the non-ideal effect of the anechoic box. 4. Remove the reference microphone and put in the DUT (device under test) to measure. The measured result then been collected through an AD/DA card and the data collected been analyzed using a personal
computer.

Test and Measurements

Fig.6 Frequency response of the preamplifier with sensor Fig.6 shows the output of the CMOS preamplifier in response to the mouth simulator being driven from 100Hz to 10KHz. Through the AD/DA Card (PB-4281) in PC to control the signal conditioner (CLIO SC-01) to produce a sinusoidal wave which frequency ranging from 100Hz to 10KHz. The sinusoidal wave drive the mouth simulator (B&K 4227) through power amplifier (CREST AUDIO Pro 5200) to generate sound which has a frequency range of 100Hz to IOsOKHz. In this way, the frequency response can be measured. Similarly, use PC to control the signal conditioner to drive the mouth simulator to produce a sound of Pa, 1 KHz. Under this measurement, the same sensing device is combined with the conventional preamplifier and the proposed preamplifier. The result is measured using an oscilloscope. The result shows that the sensitivity of the proposed preamplifier is twice as good as that of the conventional preamplifier.

As shown in Fig.8. The power consumption of the proposed preamplifier is 1.4mW.

Micro Electro Mechanical Systems, 17th, 2004. [4]. J. J. Neumann Jr. and K. J. Gabriel," A fully-integrated CMOS-MEMS audio microphone" Solid-State Sensors, 2003. [5]. Bruno Stefanelli, Jean-Paul Bardyn, Andreas Kaiser and Daniel Billet, "A very low noise CMOS preamplifier for capacitive sensors" IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, vol. 28, no.9, September 1993.

Fig.8 Sensitively of the conventional preamplifier and the proposed preamplifier

A high sensitively CMOS preamplifier suitable for silicon condenser microphone is proposed. The design, simulation and measurement results are present to validate the functionality of the preamplifier. The measurement results show that this high sensitively preamplifier has a better sensitivity performance. By applying standard CMOS process, the preamplifier can be easily integrated with proceeding systems hence minimize the cost.

Conclusion

[1]. Michael Pedersen, Wouter Olthuis and Piet Bergveld, "High-performance condenser microphone with fully integrated CMOS amplifier and DC-DC voltage converter," IEEE Journal of Microelectromechanical, vol. 7, no. 4, December 1998. [2]. Michael W.Baker and Rahul Sarpeshkar, "A low-power high-PSRR current-mode microphone preamplifier" IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, vol. 38, no.10, October 2003. M. Brauer, A. Dehe, M. Fuldner and R. [3]. Laur, "Increasing the performance of silicon microphones by the benefit of a complete system simulation" IEEE

References