An on-chip CMOS preamplifier for direct signal readout from an electret capacitor microphone has been designed with high immunity to common-mode and supply noise. The Gm-Opamp-RC based high impedance preamplifier helps to remove all disadvantages of the conventional JFET based amplifier and can drive a following switched-capacitor sigma-delta modulator in order to realize a compact digital electret microphone. The proposed chip is designed based on 0.18 µm CMOS technology, and the simulation results show 86 dB of dynamic range with 4.5 µVrms of input-referred noise for an audio bandwidth of 20 kHz and a total harmonic distortion (THD) of 1% at 90 mVrms input. Power supply rejection ratio (PSRR) and common-mode rejection ration (CMRR) are more than 95 dB at 1 kHz. The proposed design dissipates 125 µA and can operate over a wide supply voltage range of 1.6 V to 3.3 V.

A 20 kHz audio-band ADC with a single pair of power and ground pads is implemented for a digital electret microphone. Under the limited power/ground pad condition, the switching noise effect on the signal quality is estimated via post simulations with parasitic models. Performance degradation is minimized by time-domain noise isolation with sufficient time-spacing between the sampling edge and the output transition. The prototype ADC was implemented in a 0.18 µm CMOS process. It operates under a minimum supply voltage of 1.6 V with total current of 420 µA. Operating at 2.56 MHz clock frequency, it achieves 84 dB dynamic range and a 64 dB peak signal-to-(noise+distortion) ratio. The measured power supply rejection at a 100 mVpp 217 Hz square wave is -72 dB.