IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences
Online ISSN : 1745-1337
Print ISSN : 0916-8508
Special Section on Circuits and Systems
A Capacitance Measurement Device for Running Hardware Devices and Its Evaluations
Makoto NISHIZAWAKento HASEGAWANozomu TOGAWA
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2020 Volume E103.A Issue 9 Pages 1018-1027

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Abstract

In IoT (Internet-of-Things) era, the number and variety of hardware devices becomes continuously increasing. Several IoT devices are utilized at infrastructure equipments. How to maintain such IoT devices is a serious concern. Capacitance measurement is one of the powerful ways to detect anomalous states in the structure of the hardware devices. Particularly, measuring capacitance while the hardware device is running is a major challenge but no such researches proposed so far. This paper proposes a capacitance measuring device which measures device capacitance in operation. We firstly combine the AC (alternating current) voltage signal with the DC (direct current) supply voltage signal and generates the fluctuating signal. We supply the fluctuating signal to the target device instead of supplying the DC supply voltage. By effectively filtering the observed current in the target device, the filtered current can be proportional to the capacitance value and thus we can measure the target device capacitance even when it is running. We have implemented the proposed capacitance measuring device on the printed wiring board with the size of 95mm × 70mm and evaluated power consumption and accuracy of the capacitance measurement. The experimental results demonstrate that power consumption of the proposed capacitance measuring device is reduced by 65% in low-power mode from measuring mode and proposed device successfully measured capacitance in 0.002μF resolution.

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© 2020 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
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