A Resistance-to-Digital Converter possessing exceptional insensitivity to circuit parameters

Abstract

A new Resistance-to-Digital Converter (RDC) suitable for single element resistive sensors is presented in this paper. The proposed scheme is based on a relaxation oscillator circuit, which along with a timer-counter that measures the time intervals of oscillations, provides digital output proportional to the resistance of the sensor. In most of the existing RDCs, the output characteristic has gain, offset and non-linearity errors owing to various circuit parameters and their drift in the measurement unit. The output of the proposed RDC has a special nature, by the design of the measurement method, that it is not a function of the circuit parameters such as offset voltages and bias currents of the opamps and comparators used, gain of various units employed, ON-resistance of the switches, value or mismatch in the magnitudes of the reference voltages employed, etc. Such a scheme will be useful for high accuracy measurements, even in circumstances where the above-mentioned parameters may vary or drift, due to variation in the measurement environment, say, large variation in temperature. A prototype of the proposed RDC has been developed in the laboratory and the performance has been tested under various conditions. The output was found to be linear with a worst-case non-linearity of 0.06 % As expected, the sensitive of the output of the prototype RDC to various circuit parameters was found to be negligible.