The Design and Implementation of a Tilt Sensing Companion Chip for Accelerometer

Accelerometers have been widely used in many different fields of applications especially on the field of medical cares, which has been received more attention recently. Among these accelerometer-based medical care systems, the inclination information retrieved from accelerometers has been used very widely. However, due to the complexity of the information transformation, it is not feasible to implement a real-time and multi-channel accelerometer-based inclination sensing system on a low power consumption and low cost microcontroller-based embedded system. On the other hand, using the other commercial available tilt sensors or inclinometers for the applications are not adequate because of their high cost, big volume, two-axis tile angles only, and the limited usage of devices with fixed orientation. As the result, the main objectives of this proposal is to design a “Tilt sensing companion chip for accelerometer”, and implement it into a VLSI chip using TSMC 90nm CMOS technology through the fabrication service of CIC. In the proposed design, the core of the tilt angle transformation will be a hardware design transferred from our Taiwan patent-pending “CORDIC-based intelligent inclination transformation algorithm”. The chip will also be equipped with several other proposed novel designs as described in this proposal. The generated silicon intellectual property from the execution of the project can be further integrated with a 3-axis MEMS-based accelerometer to produce a digitalized, low power consumption, low cost, high precision and small size 3-axis accelerometer-based tilt sensor or inclinometer. This will be a breakthrough product for the tilt sensor industry. More importantly, it will make the multi-channel accelerometer-based inclination sensing system on medical care applications more feasible and more convenient. Furthermore, easily wearable, long battery life, and low cost medical care products will be available to compensate on the lack of medical care resources due to the rapidly changes of the aging of society.

Project ID:PB10207-1890
External Project ID:NSC102-2221-E182-069