A very low power 7.
9 bit MEMS pressure sensor
suitable for batteryless RFID applications
A.Beriain, H. Solar, R. Berenguer
CEIT & Tecnun (University of Navarra)
Paseo Manuel de Lardizábal, 13
20010 San Sebastián, SPAIN
aberiain@ceit.es
Abstract— There is a strong motivation for the development
of new low power sensors for wireless passive applications such
as RFID. In this work, a combination of a MEMS capacitive
pressure transducer and a capacitive to digital converter
compatible with a sensor enabled RFID tag are presented. The
MEMS transducer has been designed and fabricated using a
MetalMUMPs process. Its characterization showed an output
variation between 9.3 pF and 13.4 pF corresponding to a pressure
variation between 0 kPa and 30 kPa, with a INL of 0,2%. On the
other hand, the capacitance to digital converter has been
implemented in a low cost 2P4M 0.35μm CMOS standard
process. The interface measurements showed a resolution of 7.8
bit and an average power consumption of 16.56 µW. Combining
both devices together with a sensor enabled RFID tag, a long
range passive RFID sensor for pressure measurements up to 30
kPa could be implemented.
Keywords—MEMS, CMOS, RFID, low-power sensor, pressure
sensor
I. INTRODUCTION
Radiofrequency Identification (RFID) has a great potential
for increasing the quality of industrial processes, and for
improving logistics tasks and reduce production and
distribution costs. RFID tags are used in many industry
applications: automotive to track the progression and reduce
the errors through the assembly line, pharmaceutical as stock
control and dispatching improvement, among others. In order
to decrease costs, increase battery life and exploit wireless
applications, MEMS devices and RFID are integrated in the
same technology. As far as this integration is done with low
power circuits the distance between the wireless sensor and
monitoring equipments can be increased and the battery life of
the sensors improved. One of the most promising scenarios for
these RFID sensors is monitoring medical and biological
parameters. In particular, measurement of temperature and
blood pressure are cost-effective and demanded applications
[1,2]. In this paper, a combination of a MEMS capacitive
pressure sensor and a capacitive-to-digital converter
compatible with a sensor enabled RFID tag for medical
applications is introduced in detail. The MEMS capacitive
sensor is designed to improve the linearity because the
sensibility of the digital converter to that parameter. The
designed capacitive to digital converter provides high
performance in terms of dynamic range and power
978-1-4799-4132-2/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE
Authorized licensed use limited to: UNIV DE LAS PALMAS. Downloaded on February 22,2021 at 10:40:13 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
J.A. Montiel-Nelson, J. Sosa, R. Pulido, S. García-
Alonso
IUMA (University of Las Palmas de G.C.)
35017 Las Palmas GC, SPAIN
montiel@iuma.ulpgc.es
consumption. Combining both devices an ultra-low-power
sensor for pressure measurements of 30 kPa is presented. The
structure of the paper is as follows. In Section II, the MEMS
sensor is described in detail. The capacitive to digital converter
is explained in Section III. Measurement results are presented
in Section IV. And finally, the conclusions are described in
Section V.
II. MEMS TRANSDUCER
The proposed transducer is a capacitive pressure MEMS,
which was implemented using MetalMUMPs technology from
MEMSCAP. The technology process includes a polysilicon
layer isolated electrically by a two-layer nitride surface, with 2
sacrificial layers and an electroplated nickel as metal layer. Fig.
1 illustrates the profile and the layers for the different parts of
the device. In Fig. 1, layer a) is an n-type (100) silicon wafer as
substrate, b) a 2µm thick oxide (Isolation Oxide), c) a 0.35µm
layer of silicon nitride as electric isolation, d) a 0.7µm layer of
polysilicon (Poly), e) a second 0.35µm layer of silicon nitride,
f) a thin metal layer consisting of 10nm of Cr plus 25nm Pt, g)
a plating base layer of 500nm Cu plus 50nm Ti, h) a layer of
Nickel that is electroplated to a nominal thickness of 20µm,
and finally, i) a 1-3µm gold layer. A parallel plate capacitor is
build by conductors h) and d). The Poly layer d) and the two
electrical isolation layer of nitride c) and e) are vertically
moved by the deflection of the complete set, therefore
changing their capacitance due to the distance variation with
respect to the fixed ground plate h).
i)
h)
c)
a) b)
e)
g)
f)
d)
c) b)
d) e) f)
a)
g) h) i)
Fig. 1. Sketch of the proposed MEMS pressure transducer
TABLE I. shows the main dimensions of the proposed
model for a capacitive transducer of 2000x2000 μm2
diaphragm.
378
As Fig 7 shows, the INL corresponding to these measurements
is only 0.02%. This value is much smaller that the LSB
corresponding to an 8 bit resolution (0.39%) sensor. Therefore,
the measurements will not be sensitive to it.
B. Capacitance to digital converter results
In order to characterize the operation of the fabricated
sensor interface, three different dies have been characterized by
connecting them to commercial SMD capacitors between 5pF
and 23pF. The output curve of this characterization is presented
in Fig. 8. It can be seen how the interface works properly in the
complete input capacitance range. There are small deviations
between the measured and simulated results provoked by PVT
variations that could be adjusted using calibration.
Fig. 7. Transfer curve of the C2D converter
The capacitance output values obtained in the MEMS
transducer characterization are inside the input range of the
interface so a direct pressure-to-digital sensor can be derived.
Based on Fig.8 measurements the estimated output variation
corresponding to the MEMS membrane output variation
(between 9.3pF and 13.4 pF) is 236 LSB. Therefore, the
estimated resolution of the proposed pressure sensor is 7.9 bits.
Fig. 7 shows the dynamic power consumption of the
interface during a measurement. A measuring time of 51 µs
and an average power consumption of 16.56 µW have been
obtained. This low power consumption makes the proposed
interface suitable for wireless passive sensing applications [7].
Fig. 8. Power consumption of the interface during a measurement
381
Authorized licensed use limited to: UNIV DE LAS PALMAS. Downloaded on February 22,2021 at 10:40:13 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
VI. CONCLUSIONS
There is a strong motivation for the development of new
low power sensors for wireless passive applications such as
RFID. In this work, a combination of a MEMS capacitive
pressure sensor and a capacitive to digital converter compatible
with a sensor enabled RFID tag for medical applications has
been presented.
A MEMS transducer has been designed and fabricated
using a MetalMUMPs process. Its characterization showed an
output variation between 9.3 pF and 13.4 pF corresponding to
an electrostatic pressure variation between 0 kPa and 30 kPa,
with a INL of only 0.2%. In addition, a novel capacitance-to-
digital sensor interface optimized for wireless passive
monitorization applications has been designed and fabricated in
a low cost 2P4M 0.35μm CMOS standard process. The
interface avoids the use of traditional ADCs and with two
oscillators that perform a capacitance-to-time and time-to-
digital conversion. The measurements of the fabricated
interface show a resolution of 7.9 bit and an average power
consumption of 16.56 µW with a measuring rate of 20 kHz.
The capacitance output values obtained in the transducer
characterization are inside the input range of the proposed
sensor interface and a direct pressure-to-digital sensor can be
derived. Therefore, combining both devices together with a
sensor enabled RFID tag such as [7] a long range passive RFID
sensor for pressure measurements could be developed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was funded by project BATTLEWISE (TEC2011-
29148-C02-01 & TEC2011-29148-C02-02) of the Spanish
Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.
REFERENCES
[1] M. Law, A. Bermak, and H. Luong, “A sub-uW embedded CMOS
temperature sensor for RFID food monitoring application,” Solid-State
Circuits, IEEE Journal of, vol. 45, no. 6, pp. 1246–1255, 2010. “A high-
sensitive ultra-thin MEMS capacitive pressure sensor”,
[2] Beriain, Andoni; Rebollo, Ivan; Fernandez, Inaki; Sevillano, Juan
Francisco; Berenguer, R., "A passive UHF RFID pressure sensor tag
with a 7.27 bit and 5.47pJ capacitive sensor interface,"In Microwave
Symposium Digest (MTT), 2012 IEEE MTT-S International , pp.1,3, 17-
22 June 2012
[3] Meng-Lieh Sheu, Wei-Hung Hsu, and Lin-Jie Tsao. A capacitance-
ratio-modulated current front-end circuit with pulsewidth modulation
output for a capacitive sensor interface. Instrumentation and
Measurement, IEEE Transactions on, 61(2):447 –455, feb. 2012.
[4] Zhichao Tan, S.H. Shalmany, G.C.M. Meijer, and M.A.P. Pertijs. An
energy-efficient 15-bit capacitive-sensor interface based on period
modulation. Solid-State Circuits, IEEE Journal of, 47(7):1703 –1711,
july 2012.
[5] SCB10H datasheet. VTI-MURATA, 2010.
[6] R. Jacob Baker. CMOS Circuit Design, Layout, and Simulation. Wiley-
IEEE Press, 3rd edition, 2010
[7] A. Vaz, H. Solar, I. Rebollo, I. Gutierrez, and R. Berenguer. Long
range, low power UHF RFID analog front-end suitable for batteryless
wireless sensors. In Microwave Symposium Digest (MTT), 2010 IEEE
MTT-S International, pages 836 –839, may 2010.
[8] P. Dular and C. Geuzaine and F. Henrotte and W. Legros, "A general
environment for the treatment of discrete problems and its application to
the finite element method", IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. 34, n.
5, pp. 3395-3398, sep. 1998.