Over the last decade, electronics operating at high temperatures have been increasingly demanded to support in situ sensing applications such as automotive, deep-well drilling and aerospace. However, few of these applications have requirements above 460 °C, as the surface temperature of Venus, which is a specific target for the seismic sensing application in this thesis. Due to its wide bandgap, Silicon Carbide (SiC) is a promising candidate to implement integrated circuits (ICs) operating in such extreme environments. In this thesis, various analog and mixed-signal ICs in 4H-SiC bipolar technology for high-temperature sensing applications are explored, in which the device performance variation over temperatures are considered. For this purpose, device modeling, circuit design, layout design, and device/circuit characterization are involved. In this thesis, the circuits are fabricated in two batches using similar technologies. In Batch 1, the first SiC sigma-delta modulator is demonstrated to operate up to 500 °C with a 30 dB peak SNDR. Its building blocks including a fully-differential amplifier, an integrator and a comparator are characterized individually to investigate the modulator performance variation over temperatures. In the succeeding Batch 2, a SiC electromechanical sigma-delta modulator is designed with a chosen Si capacitive sensor for seismic sensing on Venus. Its building blocks including a charge amplifier, a multiplier and an oscillator are designed. Compared to Batch 1, a smaller transistor and two metal-interconnects are used to implement higher integration ICs in Batch 2. Moreover, the first VBIC-based compact model featured with continuous-temperature scalability from 27 to 500 °C is developed based on the SiC transistor in Batch 1, in order to optimize the design of circuits in Batch 2. The demonstrated performance of ICs in Batch 1 show the feasibility to further develop the SiC readout ICs for seismic sensor system operating on Venus. / <p>QC 20170911</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kth-213969 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Tian, Ye |
| Publisher | KTH, Integrerade komponenter och kretsar, Stockholm, Sweden |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | TRITA-ICT ; 17 |
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