Study of first-order thermal ΣΔ architecture for convective accelerometers

This paper presents the study of an original closed-loop conditioning approach for fully-integrated convective inertial sensors. The method is applied to an accelerometer manufactured on a standard CMOS technology using an auto-aligned bulk etching step. Using the thermal behavior of the sensor as a summing function, a first order sigma-delta modulator is built. This ldquoelectrophysicalrdquo modulator realizes an analog-to-digital conversion of the signal. Besides the feedback scheme should improve the sensor performance.