Weakly-Coupled Resonators in Capacitive Readout Circuits

Low energy consumption and wide operating temperature range of capacitors made them common in sensor designs, e.g., MEMS accelerometers, and hence increased the popularity of capacitive readout circuits. Their main challenges, in either discrete or integrated implementations, are sensitivity, noise, energy consumption, and parasitic components at the analog front end. Compared to conventional “frequency-shift monitoring” which is one of the most accurate and common methods for capacitance measurements, weakly-coupled resonators (well-known in mechanical systems) can offer up to three orders of magnitude increase in sensitivity. Therefore, this concept has been recently applied to the design of micromechanical sensors, e.g., for sensitive mass sensing. This paper applies, for the first time in the electrical domain, the concept of monitoring the eigenstates variations in weakly-coupled resonators as a generic readout circuit technique for measuring very small capacitance changes. The outstanding sensitivity of this method is verified analytically and demonstrated using both extensive circuit simulations and experimental measurements.