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High CMRR Instrumentation Amplifier (Schematic and Layout) design for biomedical applications

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Instrumentation amplifiers are intended to be used whenever acquisition of a useful signal is difficult. IA’s must have extremely high input impedances because source impedances may be high and/or unbalanced. bias and offset currents are low and relatively stable so that the source impedance need not be constant. Balanced differential inputs are provided so that the signal source may be referenced to any reasonable level independent of the IA output load reference. Common mode rejection, a measure of input balance, is very high so that noise pickup and ground drops, characteristic of remote sensor applications, are minimized.Care is taken to provide high, well characterized stability of critical parameters under varying conditions, such as changing temperatures and supply voltages. Finally, all components that are critical to the performance of the IA are internal to the device. The precision of an IA is provided at the expense of flexibility. By committing to the one specific task of
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Engineers work to better monitor missile health

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The Aviation and Missile Research Development and Engineering Center is leveraging micro-electro-mechanical systems research in a new application to detect potentially damaging vibrations encountered by missiles during handling, transport and operation.


Stephen Marotta, Engineering Directorate project principal investigator, said MEMS research has been ongoing at AMRDEC for many years and many different applications have been successfully transitioned from the lab to the Soldier in the field.

In an effort to improve missile health monitoring, Marotta began collaborating with Mohan Sanghadasa, from AMRDEC’s Weapons Development and Integration Directorate, and Stephen Horowitz, an engineer with Ducommun Miltec.

The AMRDEC team is using technology, both current and in-development, to design a new MEMS sensor that will offer several benefits over current missile health monitoring systems.

“We’ve spent a number of years developing acoustic sensors, microphones based on piezoelectric materials,” Horowitz said, “and there’s not a huge difference between designing a microphone and designing a vibration sensor and accelerometers. It’s a different structure, a different geometry, but we use the same fabrication processes to create them. On our first generation sensor, we used the same materials even.”