Design of a Low-Noise Multi-Range Broadband Front-End Amplifier for MEMS Electric Field Sensor

The practical application of Microelectromechanical system (MEMS) electric field sensors is limited due to several issues, including low sensitivity, narrow measurement range, and limited frequency range. This article introduces a fully differential CMOS preamplifier design for MEMS micro DC electric field sensors, and proposes a new multi-range charge sensing amplifier that eases the trade-off between gain, bandwidth and noise. Using the XFAB-H035 process and a folded cascode amplifier with a gain boosting structure, a low-noise, high DC gain and wide-band operational amplifier is designed.