Performance of several readout circuits, when applied to a MEMS-based bulk piezoresistive displacement sensor is compared in this study. The sensor comprises a pair of tilted clamped-guided silicon beams whose bulk piezoresistivity is used for displacement sensing. Wheatstone half-bridge, constant-voltage, and constant-current circuits are implemented to measure resistance changes of this sensor. We report full characterization of the sensor with these circuits and explore the sensor’s important characteristics such as linearity, bandwidth, and noise. The results reveal that the constant-current circuit provides the highest sensitivity at equal-power bias condition. We find that the resolution of the sensor is degraded from 1.6 nm with the Wheatstone half-bridge and constant-voltage circuits to about 4.2 nm with the constant-current configuration. In the frequency domain, the sensor captures the full dynamics of the MEMS nanopositioner up to 20 kHz with all readout circuits. [2019-0168]

中文翻译：

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SOI-MEMS 体压阻式位移传感器：读出电路的比较研究

本研究比较了几种读出电路在应用于基于 MEMS 的体压阻位移传感器时的性能。该传感器包括一对倾斜的夹持导引硅梁，其体压阻用于位移传感。采用惠斯通半桥、恒压、恒流电路来测量该传感器的电阻变化。我们报告了具有这些电路的传感器的完整特性，并探索了传感器的重要特性，例如线性度、带宽和噪声。结果表明，恒流电路在等功率偏置条件下提供了最高的灵敏度。我们发现传感器的分辨率从惠斯通半桥和恒压电路的 1.6 nm 降低到恒流配置的约 4.2 nm。在频域中，传感器使用所有读出电路捕获高达 20 kHz 的 MEMS 纳米定位器的完整动态。[2019-0168]