A Low-Power Sensitive Integrated Sensor System for Thermal Flow Monitoring

Ruikuan Lu, A. K.M. Arifuzzman, Md Kamal Hossain, Steven Gardner, Sazia A. Eliza, J. Iwan D. Alexander, Yehia Massoud, Mohammad R. Haider

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Scopus citations

Abstract

Thermal-based flow monitoring has found widespread applications due to its noncontact measurement, high sensitivity, low flow resistance, miniaturization, ease of integration, and low-power consumption. In this work, a low-cost and affordable inkjet-printed graphene-based thermal sensor is integrated with a low-power CMOS circuit for flow rate monitoring. The custom inkjet-printed sensor consists of a silver nanoparticle interdigitated pattern with a coating of graphene, all printed on a glossy photo-paper substrate. The sensor read-out circuit is an energy-efficient current-starved ring oscillator. The sensor current controls the bias current of a current-starved ring oscillator and modulates the output frequency. A driver circuit then transforms the output to a square wave pulse signal. The scheme is designed and fabricated using the 0.13-μm standard CMOS process and occupies an area of 1.5 mm ×1.7 mm. Test results indicate that the prototype ring oscillator circuit consumes 19-90μW for an oscillation frequency variation of 517 kHz-6.45 MHz. The output frequency variation with sensor current shows linear performance with R2 = 0.9966.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)2949-2953
Number of pages5
JournalIEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
Volume27
Issue number12
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 1 2019
Externally publishedYes

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