A new gas bio-sensor in the structure of a micro-machined clamped-clamped inertial beam and its readout circuit

This study presents a novel gas bio-sensor in the form of a micro-machined resonator and its readout circuit. The resonator has the structure of a clamped-clamped beam with thermal actuation and piezo-resistive sensing that supports a plate capable of being attached with test gas molecules to detect gas concentration. The purpose of this study is to design and fabricate the micro-scaled inertial beam with its readout circuit in a system-on-chip package. The circuit includes a driver, a front-end converter, a feed-trough reduction unit, a square-wave converter and a phase detector. In the process of signal reading, the sensor is first driven by a DDS module and power amplifier, and then sense the vibrations by piezo-resistivity. The piezo-resistivity is detected by a Wheatstone bridge circuits. The carried signal of modulation is processed by a Wheatstone bridge circuits. An instrumentation amplifier adjusts the gain to the appropriate amplitude. The circuit with reduction on feed-through noise increases the SNR. Square wave conversion circuit and PFD process the signal and the driver reference signal to detect phase difference. The data of phase difference is counted into a microcontroller dsPIC4011 and then the data being transmitted to the computer by RS232 to a USB adapter. Finally, the whole circuit is implemented by using TSMC 0.35 2P4M process and one-step post-processing.