Abstract
Nowadays, capacitive sensors are widely used in the measurement of physical quantities such as displacement, humidity, pressure, etc. This wide dissemination is mainly due to the development of MEMS technologies that have reduced their cost, size and consumption. To measure these capacitance changes, sensor electronic interfaces have been developed to obtain an exploitable electrical signal such as voltage, current, time, frequency or directly a digital output. It is in this framework that the aim of this thesis is positioned ; to study the feasibility of a capacitive measurement with digital output from an active bridge, an architecture developed and patented by the Design and Test Microsystems team of LIRMM for conditioning low power resistive sensors. The digital conversion used is a one-bit first-order Sigma-Delta modulation that is relatively easy to implement, and is well adapted to integration, low power consumption and realization of generic sensor interfaces. Two feedback architectures have been proposed: a resistive feedback and a capacitive. The theoretical results are compared with the results of simulations and measurements obtained from prototypes fabricated using a 0.35μm CMOS technology from Austria MicroSystem (AMS).