TY - JOUR
T1 - Calibration and characterization of self-powered floating-gate usage monitor with single electron per second operational limit
AU - Huang, Chenling
AU - Lajnef, Nizar
AU - Chakrabartty, Shantanu
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received August 26, 2008; revised March 11, 2009 and May 08, 2009. First published date June 10, 2009; current version published March 05, 2010. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant CMMI 0700632 and in part by the Federal Highway Administration under Contract DTFH61-08-C-00015. This paper was recommended by Associate Editor A. J. Lopez Martin.
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - Self-powered monitoring refers to a signal processing technique where the computational power is harvested directly from the signal being monitored. In this paper, we present the design and calibration of a CMOS event counter for long-term, self-powered mechanical usage monitoring. The counter exploits a log-linear response of the hot-electron injection process on a floating-gate transistor when biased in weak-inversion. By configuring an array of floating-gate injectors to respond to different amplitude levels of the input signal, a complete analog processor has been designed that implements a level counting algorithm, which is widely used in mechanical usage monitoring. Measured results from a fabricated prototype in a 0.5-μm CMOS process demonstrate that the processor can sense, store and compute over 105 usage cycles with an injection limit approaching one single electron per second and with a counting resolution of 5 bits. This paper also presents a calibration algorithm that is used for compensating the variations which arise due to device mismatch, power supply and temperature fluctuations. The maximum current rating of the fabricated analog processor has been measured to be less than 160 nA making it ideal for practical self-powered sensing applications.
AB - Self-powered monitoring refers to a signal processing technique where the computational power is harvested directly from the signal being monitored. In this paper, we present the design and calibration of a CMOS event counter for long-term, self-powered mechanical usage monitoring. The counter exploits a log-linear response of the hot-electron injection process on a floating-gate transistor when biased in weak-inversion. By configuring an array of floating-gate injectors to respond to different amplitude levels of the input signal, a complete analog processor has been designed that implements a level counting algorithm, which is widely used in mechanical usage monitoring. Measured results from a fabricated prototype in a 0.5-μm CMOS process demonstrate that the processor can sense, store and compute over 105 usage cycles with an injection limit approaching one single electron per second and with a counting resolution of 5 bits. This paper also presents a calibration algorithm that is used for compensating the variations which arise due to device mismatch, power supply and temperature fluctuations. The maximum current rating of the fabricated analog processor has been measured to be less than 160 nA making it ideal for practical self-powered sensing applications.
KW - Event monitoring
KW - Floating-gate transistors
KW - Impact-ionized hot-electron injection
KW - Level-crossing algorithms
KW - Self-powering
KW - Structural health monitoring
KW - Subthreshold analog circuits
KW - Ultralow power sensors
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=77949360212&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/TCSI.2009.2024976
DO - 10.1109/TCSI.2009.2024976
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:77949360212
SN - 1549-8328
VL - 57
SP - 556
EP - 568
JO - IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers
JF - IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers
IS - 3
M1 - 5071181
ER -