A rail-to-rail differential quasi-digital converter for low-power applications

This paper presents an ultra low power differential voltage-to-frequency converter (dVFC) suitable to be used as a part of a multisensory interface in portable applications. The proposed dVFC has been designed in 1.2-V 0.18-μm CMOS technology, and it works properly over the whole differential input range (0.6 ± 0.6 V) providing an output frequency range of 0.0–0.9 MHz. The system has been tested for temperature variations from ?40 to +120 °C and supply voltage variations of up to 30 %, being the maximum linearity error in the worse case of 0.017 %. Simulations against common mode voltage variations show a deviation in the output frequency of 0.4 %. This dVFC has power consumption below 60 μW, and it includes an enable terminal that sets the system in a sleep mode (180 nW) while no conversion is request. The dVFC occupies an active area of 250 μm × 150 μm.