CMOS digitalized peak detector for a MEMS-based electrostatic field sensor

This paper presents a new CMOS peak detector that directly converts the peak of a sine wave signal to its digital representation. This peak detector is capable of capturing peak points that carry the information of the electrostatic field, simplifying the sample-and-hold requirement. By making use of the voltage to time conversion (or voltage to duty cycle conversion), the method boasts the advantage of high resolution compared with the conventional way of using AD converters. The circuit is fabricated in Chartered 0.35 um technology and is further tested.