Multi-phase clocking based high precision dielectric constant measurement for embedded applications

The precise estimation of dielectric constant is very essential requirement in several embedded applications. The cavity resonator and ring oscillator based techniques work well, but require costly setup for dielectric constant measurement. These techniques also become specific to a frequency range for precise estimation. The digital techniques for estimating the dielectric constant are investigated here. The Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based hard wired digital logic with high precision computation is used for estimating the dielectric constant. The simulation and synthesis is carried out in Xilinx ISE environment and results are analyzed by varying the dielectric constant. The realized logic is synthesized to Spartan-6 FPGA and observed that only 10% of logic resources are occupied in Spartan-6 LX16 device, reporting maximum operable frequency of 300 MHz. As a result the proposed scheme can be used for dielectric constant measurement at any frequency up to 25 MHz.