An Energy-Efficient Flexible Capacitive Pressure Sensing System

Flexible capacitive pressure sensing system (FCPSS) is promising in the area of healthcare, robotics, and Internet of Things (IoT). As the size of the sensing array increases, designing energy-efficient FCPSS is getting challenging. This work provides a comprehensive solution for low-power FCPSS design, where major contributions are as follows. 1) Crosstalk-induced measurement error in a crossbar structure FCPSS is first studied and an accurate and low-power linear iterative algorithm is proposed for on-chip sensing array calibration (SAC). 2) Binary Neural Network (BNN)-based spatial-temporal adaptive sensing scheme for FCPSS is first proposed to utilize the sparsity of sampling and to further improve energy efficiency. Combined with the clock-gating-friendly low-power sensor interface, the system consumes 31.39 mu J energy and gains 95.04% capacitor measurement accuracy for each sensing operation on a 10x10 array, achieving 116x energy reduction compared with the state-of-the-art technology.