Design of a Multiple Channel Capacitance Measurement Integrated Circuit for Electronic Skin Application

Capacitance measure is a technique for applications such as capacitance tomography and capacitive sensor readout. This paper presents a multiple channel capacitance measurement IC which is based on a switched-capacitor design in 0.18um process. It can be used on electronic-skin or other array-type sensors system. It contains of capacitance voltage conversion units and a single-slope ADC. It uses multiple channels at the same time to compensate the disadvantage on speed. Test result shows that the dynamic range can reach 45.1dB, and the conversion rate is about 5us/row in this paper.