Capacitive Sensing Circuit for Low Power and High Resolution

This paper describes the possibility of a low-power, high-resolution fingerprint sensor chip. A modified capacitive detection circuit of charge sharing scheme is proposed, which reduces the static power dissipation and increases the voltage difference between a ridge and valley more than conventional circuit. The detection circuit is designed and simulated in 3.3V, $0.35{\mu}m$ standard CMOS process, 40MHz condition. The result shows about 35% power dissipation reduction and 90% improvement of difference between a ridge and valley sensing voltage. The proposed circuit is more stable and effective than a typical circuit.