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US 12,467,793 B2Granted
Analog-to-digital converter and thermopile array
AssigneeCsmc Technologies Fab2 Co., Ltd.
InventorsChen Li, Hao Wang
Life of this patent
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Abstract
An analog-to-digital converter and a thermopile array. The analog-to-digital converter comprises: a reference voltage generation circuit comprising a voltage generation unit; a chopping modulation unit used to perform chopping modulation on a voltage signal generated by the voltage generation unit, and to modulate low frequency noise of the voltage signal into high frequency noise; and a low-pass filter used to eliminate the high frequency noise to obtain a reference voltage. The invention employs a simple structure to obtain a low noise reference voltage at low costs.
Claims13
A thermopile array, comprising:
- a plurality of sensor pixel cells;
- and
- a readout integrated circuit (ROIC) including multiple signal processing channels, each of the signal processing channels including:
- a pre-amplifier configured to amplify a sensor signal, the pre-amplifier being a single-stage amplifier;
- and
- an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) having an input terminal coupled to an output terminal of the pre-amplifier, the ADC being a delta-sigma ADC and including a reference voltage generation circuit;
- wherein the reference voltage generation circuit includes:
- a voltage generation unit;
- a chopping modulation unit configured to perform chopping modulation on a voltage signal generated by the voltage generation unit, and modulate low-frequency noise of the voltage signal into high-frequency noise;
- and
- a low-pass filter configured to eliminate the high-frequency noise to obtain a reference voltage;
- and
- wherein each of the signal processing channels is configured to process the sensor signals output by i sensor pixel cells, where i is a positive integer, and when the number of the plurality of sensor pixel cells is no less than 256, i is no greater than the number of the sensor pixel cells of the thermopile array divided by 4 after extraction of root;
- and
- wherein no low-pass filter is arranged between the ADC and the pre-amplifier of each of the signal processing channels.
12 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.