Dr. Tim Piessens

Barometric pressure sensors are indispensable features in wearable consumer devices. Modern designs can sense absolute height difference of less than 8.5cm (1Pa), improving indoor navigation significantly and enabling new applications such as activity tracking and crash detection. In this talk, we will take a deep dive into the design challenges of readout chains for capacitive pressure sensors. The main driving requirements are noise and power. To reach the demanding targets for wearable devices, heavy duty cycling and advanced analog front-end design is needed. But these are not the only challenges. Since they must be exposed to the atmosphere, pressure sensors in smartphones are often located in their outer cases, and have long connections to the main PCB. This leads to high demands on their PSRR and RF immunity. Both topics will be discussed, as well as several methods to improve the robustness of pressure sensor readout chains.

Biography:

Tim Piessens received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, in 1998 and 2003, respectively. During his Ph.D., he focused on a new type of power amplifier/line driver for xDSL applications. In 2004, he co-founded ICsense, where he is the CTO and is responsible for the technical content of projects in the medical, automotive and consumer fields. His current research interests include analog sensor readouts, nonlinear system design, power management, high-voltage design and low-power, low-noise analog front-end design. From 2014 till 2021, he was a member of the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference Technical Program Committee. He was a member of the ISSCC EU leadership, the ISSCC executive committee and the ISSCC vision committee from 2019 till 2021 and ITPC EU chair in 2021. From 2020 on, he is a member of the ESSDERC-ESSCIRC Steering Committee.