Development of an ANN-Based Linearization Technique for the VCO Thermistor Circuit

This paper presents the development of an artificial neural network (ANN)-based linearization technique for the voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) thermistor circuit. VCO thermistor circuit exhibits a linear analog temperature-frequency relation over a temperature range of 0 °C-100 °C with good response and reasonable error. An ANN-based direct modeling technique is used for a nonlinearity estimation of VCO thermistor circuit to further improve the linearity. The performance of the developed technique has been experimentally verified. A linearity of approximately ±0.2% and sensitivity of 5 kHz/°C are achieved over a temperature range of 0 °C-100 °C, with a high thermal stability. A notable feature of the developed technique is linearity and sensitivity of the temperature measurement, which are quite high. The efficacy of the technique is established through simulation studies and its practicality is demonstrated on a prototype unit.