A Robust Capacitive Digital Read-Out Circuit for a Scalable Tactile Skin

This paper presents a robust, capacitive digital read-out circuit (ROC) for sensitive skin applications in humanoid robots. The ROC can be calibrated to null the parasitic effects of transducer variation due to physical assembly. A prototype is fabricated in a 130 nm RFCMOS process, with an active area of 221x79 mu m(2) and 1.84 mu W power consumption at V-DD = 1.2V and 1ms read-out rate. The ROC output is robust to V-DD and temperature variations in a range | Delta V-DD|