Design of a Low-Power, Small-Area AEC-Q100-Compliant SENT Transmitter in Signal Conditioning IC for Automotive Pressure and Temperature Complex Sensors in 180 Nm CMOS Technology

Abstract

In this paper, a low-power and small-area Single Edge Nibble Transmission (SENT) transmitter design is proposed for automotive pressure and temperature complex sensor applications. To reduce the cost and size of the hardware, the pressure and temperature information is processed with a single integrated circuit (IC) and transmitted at the same time to the electronic control unit (ECU) through SENT. Due to its digital nature, it is immune to noise, has reduced sensitivity to electromagnetic interference (EMI), and generates low EMI. It requires only one PAD for its connectivity with ECU, and thus reduces the pin requirements, simplifies the connectivity, and minimizes the printed circuit board (PCB) complexity. The design is fully synthesizable, and independent of technology. The finite state machine-based approach is employed for area efficient implementation, and to translate the proposed architecture into hardware. The IC is fabricated in 1P6M 180 nm CMOS process with an area of (116 μm × 116 μm) and 4.314 K gates. The current consumption is 50 μA from a 1.8 V supply with a total 90 μW power. For compliance with AEC-Q100 for automotive reliability, a reverse and over voltage protection circuit is also implemented with human body model (HBM) electro-static discharge (ESD) of +6 kV, reverse voltage of −16 V to 0 V, over voltage of 8.2 V to 16 V, and fabricated area of 330 μm × 680 μm. The extensive testing, measurement, and simulation results prove that the design is fully compliant with SAE J2716 standard.

A Highly Accurate, Polynomial-Based Digital Temperature Compensation for Piezoresistive Pressure Sensor in 180 nm CMOS Technology

“…Typical signal conditioning integrated circuits nowadays usually perform analog and digital processing for improving automotive PRT sensor linearity, offset and gain errors [ 7 , 19 ]. Figure 2 shows the block diagram for a proposed PRT sensor interface IC with the presented polynomial-based digital temperature compensation.…”

“…The final pressure code with temperature compensation is delivered to an electronic control unit (ECU) interface (EI). The EI is either a digital to analog (DAC) converter with driving buffer amplifier (DA) [ 7 ] or it is a digital serial interface such as single edge nibble transmission (SENT) [ 19 ]. In the proposed pressure sensor interface chip, SENT is incorporated for its interface with the ECU and the final output signal SOUT is an asynchronous digital signal.…”

A Precise Current Detection Method Using a Single Shunt and FET Rds(on) of a Low-Voltage Three-Phase Inverter

“…Contactless current sensors such as Hall-type current sensors are composed of integrated circuits, so EMI countermeasures against radio frequency are required (Refs. [13][14][15][16][17]). In addition, as well as Hall-type current sensors, research using a current transformer (CT) or shunt to measure current accurately at low cost is one example of design [18][19][20][21][22].…”

A Highly Reliable, 5.8 GHz DSRC Wake-Up Receiver with an Intelligent Digital Controller for an ETC System

“…It also replaces complex blocks such as ADC and BPF after amplifier and comparator [ 8 , 9 , 10 , 24 ] and reduces current consumption and area. Due to its digital nature, it is fully synthesizable, immune to noise and PVT variations [ 25 ], offers system flexibility, a wide dynamic range for wake-up and oscillator frequencies, and is adaptive to technology scaling.…”