Capacitive sensors are widely employed in IoT applications and smart edge devices to detect a broad range of physical quantities, such as pressure, humidity, acceleration, and proximity. These applications demand capacitance-to-digital converters (CDCs) that offer high resolution, low latency, and exceptional energy efficiency.

This talk will begin with an overview of the fundamental principles and design trade-offs of capacitive sensor readout circuits, followed by recent research advances, including emerging converter architecture and time-domain quantization techniques. This talk will conclude with a discussion of future directions in the design of CDCs.

Biography:

Xiyuan Tang (Senior Member, IEEE) received the B.Sc. degree (Hons.) from the School of Microelectronics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, in 2012, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA, in 2014 and 2019, respectively.

He was a Design Engineer with Silicon Laboratories, Austin, from 2014 to 2017, where he was involved in the RF receiver design. From 2019 to 2021, he was a Post-Doctoral Researcher with The University of Texas at Austin. He is currently an Assistant Professor with Peking University, Beijing, China. His research interests include digitally assisted data converters, low-power mixed-signal circuits, and analog data processing.

Dr. Tang was a recipient of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Rising Stars in 2020, Best Paper Award at Silicon Labs Tech Symposium in 2016, National Scholarship in 2011, and Shanghai Scholarship in 2010. He serves on the Technical Program Committees (TPC) of ISSCC. He also serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Solid-State Circuits Letters.