Vol. 117, Issue 6, June 2010, pp.16-28

A Holistic Approach to Automated Synthesis of Mixed-technology Digital MEMS Sensors Part 2:
Synthesis of a MEMS System with Associated Control Loop

Chenxu ZHAO and Tom J. KAZMIERSKI

School of Electronics and Computer Science

University of Southampton, UK

E-mail: cz05r@ecs.soton.ac.uk, tjk@ecs.soton.ac.uk

Received: 13 May 2010   /Accepted: 21 June 2010   /Published: 25 June 2010

Abstract: Part 2 of this paper presents a holistic synthesis approach to designing both the mechanical layout and associated electronic control in a mixed-domain MEMS sensor. It develops further the concepts presented in Part 1 which focuses on layout synthesis of the mechanical part only. A case study is discussed where the proposed genetic-based synthesis approach implemented in SystemC-AGNES is applied to a high order ΣΔ control system in an electromechanical MEMS accelerometer. The method efficiently and in an automated manner generates suitable configurations of the ΣΔ control loop by combining primitive components stored in a library and optimizes them according to user specifications. The synthesis results show that the proposed technique explores the configuration space effectively and it develops new circuit structures which have not been investigated before. The noise floors in the MEMS accelerometers synthesized by SystemC-AGNES are further reduced leading to an improvement of the SNR compared with a manually designed standard electromechanical ΣΔ MEMS accelerometer.

Keywords: High order ΣΔ modulator, MEMS accelerometer, Synthesis, SystemC-A

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