Capacitance detection is a universal transduction mechanism used in a wide variety of sensors and applications. It requires an electronic front-end converting the capacitance variation into another more convenient physical variable, ultimately determining the performance of the whole sensor. In this paper we present a comprehensive review of the different signal conditioning front-end topologies targeted in particular at sub-femtofarad resolution. Main design equations and analysis of the limits due to noise are reported in order to provide the designer with guidelines for choosing the most suitable topology according to the main design specifications, namely energy consumption, area occupation, measuring time and resolution. A data-driven comparison of the different solutions in literature is also carried out revealing that resolution, measuring time, area occupation and energy/conversion lower than 100 aF, 1 ms 0.1 mm 2 , and 100 pJ/conv. can be obtained by capacitance to digital topologies, which therefore allow to get the best compromise among all design specifications.

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This paper presents a sensor-readout circuit system suitable for presence detection. The sensor consists of a miniaturized polysilicon thermopile, realized employing MEMS micromachining by STMicroelectronics, featuring a responsivity value equal to 180 V/W, with 13 ms response time. The readout circuit is implemented in a standard 130-nm CMOS process. As the sensor output signal behaves substantially as a DC, the interface circuit employs the chopper technique in order to minimize offset and noise contributions at low frequency, achieving a measured input referred offset standard deviation equal to 1.36 μ V. Measurements show that the presented system allows successfully detecting the presence of a person in a room standing at 5.5 m from the sensor. Furthermore, the correct operation of the system with moving targets, considering people either walking or running, was also demonstrated.

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