This thesis describes the design and realization of CMOS-compatible CO2 sensors based on thermal conductivity (TC) measurement for indoor air-quality sensing. The goal of this work is to investigate the advantages and limitations of sensing CO2 based on TC measurement, and to exploit its potential to achieve the best possible performance in terms of both CO2 resolution and energy efficiency. Both system-level and circuit-level techniques have been explored, resulting in three prototypes that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques. The final prototype, using a time-domain readout approach, achieves a CO2 resolution better than 100 ppm while consuming only 12 mJ per measurement, representing the best-reported performance for a CMOS CO2 sensor in terms of both resolution and energy consumption.@en

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The measurement of carbon-dioxide (CO2) concentration is very important in home and building automation, e.g. to control ventilation in energy-efficient buildings. This application requires compact, low-cost sensors that can measure CO₂ concentration with a resolution of <200 ppm over a 2500ppm range. Conventional optical (NDIR-based) CO₂ sensors require components that are CMOS-incompatible, difficult to miniaturize and power-hungry [1]. Due to their CMOS compatibility, thermal-conductivity-based sensors are an attractive alternative [2,3]. They exploit the fact that the thermal conductivity (TC) of CO₂ is lower than that of the other constituents of air, so that CO2 concentration can be indirectly measured via the heat loss of a hot wire to ambient. However, this approach requires the detection of very small changes in TC (0.25 ppm per ppm CO2 [3]).

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This paper presents a readout circuit for a carbon dioxide (COࠢ) sensor that measures the CO₂-dependent thermal time constant of a hot-wire transducer. The readout circuit periodically heats up the transducer and uses a phase-domain Δ Σ modulator to digitize the phase shift of the resulting temperature transients. A single resistive transducer is used both as a heater and as a temperature sensor, thus greatly simplifying its fabrication. To extract the transducer's resistance, and hence its temperature, in the presence of large heating currents, a pair of transducers is configured as a differentially driven bridge. The transducers and the readout circuit have been implemented in a standard 0.16μm CMOS technology, with an active area of 0.3 and 3.14 mm², respectively. The sensor consumes 6.8 mW from a 1.8-V supply, of which 6.3 mW is dissipated in the transducers. A resolution of 94-ppm CO₂ is achieved in a 1.8-s measurement time, which corresponds to an energy consumption of 12 mJ per measurement, >10x less than prior CO₂ sensors in CMOS technology.@en

This paper reports a readout circuit capable of accurately measuring not only the resistance of a resistive transducer, but also the power dissipated in it, which is a critical parameter in thermal flow sensors or thermal-conductivity sensors. A front-end circuit, integrated in a standard CMOS technology, sets the voltage drop across the transducer, and senses the resulting current via an on-chip reference resistor. The voltages across the transducer and the reference resistor are digitized by a time-multiplexed high-resolution analog-todigital converter (ADC) and post-processed to calculate resistance and power dissipation. To obtain accurate resistance and power readings, a voltage reference and a temperature-compensated reference resistor are required. An accurate voltage reference is constructed algorithmically, without relying on precision analog signal processing, by using the ADC to successively digitize the base-emitter voltages of an on-chip bipolar transistor biased at several different current levels, and then combining the results to obtain the equivalent of a precision curvature-corrected bandgap reference with a temperature coefficient of 18 ppm/°C, which is close to the state-of-the-art. We show that the same ADC readings can be used to determine die temperature, with an absolute inaccuracy of ±0.25 °C (5 samples, min-max) after a 1-point trim. This information is used to compensate for the temperature dependence of the on-chip polysilicon reference resistor, effectively providing a temperature-compensated resistance reference. With this approach, the resistance and power dissipation of a 100 Ω transducer have been measured with an inaccuracy of less than ±0.55 Ω and ±0.8%, respectively, from -40 °C to 125 °C.@en

This paper reports a readout circuit for a resistive CO2 sensor, which operates by measuring the CO2-dependent thermal conductivity of air. A suspended hot-wire transducer, which acts both as a resistive heater and temperature sensor, exhibits a CO2-dependent heat loss to the surrounding air, allowing CO2 concentration to be derived from its temperature rise and power dissipation. The circuit employs a dual-mode incremental delta-sigma ADC to digitize these parameters relative to those of an identical, but isolated, reference transducer. This ratiometric approach results in a measurement that does not require precision voltage or power references. The readout circuit uses dynamically-swapped transducer pairs to cancel their baseline-resistance, so as to relax the required dynamic range of the ADC. In addition, dynamic element matching (DEM) is used to bias the transducer pairs at an accurate current ratio, making the measurement insensitive to the precise value of the bias current. The readout circuit has been implemented in a standard 0.16 μm CMOS technology. With commercial resistive micro-heaters, a CO2 sensing resolution of about 200 ppm (1σ) was achieved in a measurement time of 30 s. Similar results were obtained with CMOS-compatible tungsten-wire transducers, paving the way for fully-integrated CO2 sensors for air-quality monitoring.@en