Development of a CMOS ASIC for smoke detection

We report an ASIC in 0.8 um CMOS technology especially taylored for smoke detection applications. The chip consists of an integrated photodiode, which reveals the light scattered by smoke particles, and of the related electronics. The circuit design, based on the Switched-Capacitors technique, accomplishes low noise specifications by means of an accurate design of the first read-out stage and by employing Correlated Double Sampling filtering blocks. Preliminary results from the electrical characterization of the first chip prototype allowed the basic design methodology to be validated.