Capacitive sensors produce spectacular resolution of movement to one part in 10-10 meters and maintain exceptional long-term stability in hostile environments. They are increasingly used for a variety of jobs in consumer and industrial equipment, including wall stud sensors, keypads, lamp dimmers, micrometers, calipers, rotation encoders, and more. The most focused, authoritative book available in the field, Capacitive Sensors brings you complete information on the research, design, and production of capacitive sensors. This all-in-one source provides detailed, comprehensive coverage of key topics, including underlying theory, electrode configuration, and practical circuits. In addition, you'll find reviews of a number of tested systems never before published. Capacitive Sensors is a must-have for product designers and mechanical and electrical engineers interested in using this fast-developing technology to get top price and performance advantages.

Capacitive sensors produce spectacular resolution of movement to one part in 10-10 meters and maintain exceptional long-term stability in hostile environments. They are increasingly used for a variety of jobs in consumer and industrial equipment, including wall stud sensors, keypads, lamp dimmers, micrometers, calipers, rotation encoders, and more. The most focused, authoritative book available in the field, "Capacitive Sensors" brings you complete information on the research, design, and production of capacitive sensors. This all-in-one source provides detailed, comprehensive coverage of key topics, including underlying theory, electrode configuration, and practical circuits. In addition, you'll find reviews of a number of tested systems never before published. "Capacitive Sensors" is a must-have for product designers and mechanical and electrical engineers interested in using this fast-developing technology to get top price and performance advantages.

1.1 Overview of Lab-on-Chip Laboratory-on-Chip (LoC) is a multidisciplinary approach used for the miniaturization, integration and automation of biological assays or procedures in analytical chemistry [1–3]. Biology and chemistry are experimental sciences that are continuing to evolve and develop new protocols. Each protocol offers step-by-step laboratory instructions, lists of the necessary equipments and required biological and/or chemical substances [4–7]. A biological or chemical laboratory contains various pieces of equipment used for performing such protocols and, as shown in Fig. 1.1, the engineering aspect of LoC design is aiming to embed all these components in a single chip for single-purpose applications. 1.1.1 Main Objectives of LoC Systems Several clear advantages of this technology over conventional approaches, including portability, full automation, ease of operation, low sample consumption and fast assays time, make LoC suitable for many applications including. 1.1.1.1 Highly Throughput Screening To conduct an experiment, a researcher fills a well with the required biological or chemical analytes and keeps the sample in an incubator for some time to allowing the sample to react properly. Afterwards, any changes can be observed using a microscope. In order to quickly conduct millions of biochemical or pharmacolo- cal tests, the researchers will require an automated highly throughput screening (HTS) [8], comprised of a large array of wells, liquid handling devices (e.g., mic- channel, micropump and microvalves [9–11]), a fully controllable incubator and an integrated sensor array, along with the appropriate readout system.

Sensor technologies have experienced dramatic growth in recent years, making a significant impact on national security, health care, environmental improvement, energy management, food safety, construction monitoring, manufacturing and process control, and more. However, education on sensor technologies has not kept pace with this rapid development

This book describes ultra low power capacitive sensor interfaces, and presents the realization of a very low power generic sensor interface chip that is adaptable to a broad range of capacitive sensors. The book opens by reviewing important design aspects for autonomous sensor systems, discusses different building blocks, and presents the modular architecture for the generic sensor interface chip. Finally, the generic sensor interface chip is shown in state-of-the-art applications.

* Sensor technology is an increasingly important area of research * This will be the only book entirely devoted to the topic

This book gives the reader a comprehensive overview on the working principles, equivalent circuit models and most advanced interfacing techniques for differential capacitive transducers, highlighting benefits and downsides of each option.