Enhancing Linearity of Voltage Controlled Oscillator Thermistor Signal Conditioning Circuit Using Linear Search

Temperature to Frequency Converters (TFCs) are potential signal conditioning circuits (SCCs) usually employed in temperature measurements using thermistors. A NE/SE-566 based SCC has been recently used in several reported works as TFC. Application of NE/SE-566 based SCC requires a mechanism for finding the optimal values of SCC parameters yielding the optimal linearity and desired sensitivity performances. Two classical methods, namely, inflection point and three point have been employed for this task. In this work, the application of these two methods, on NE/SE-566 based SCC in TFC, is investigated in detail and the conditions for its effective usage are developed. Further, since these classical methods offer an approximate linearization of temperature and frequency relationship an application of a linear search based technique is proposed to further enhance the linearity. The implemented linear search method used results obtained from the above mentioned classical methods. The presented simulation studies, for three different industrial grade thermistors, revealed that the linearity enhancements of 21.7, 18.3 and 17.8% can be achieved over the inflection point method and 4.9, 4.7 and 4.7% over the three point method, for an input temperature range of 0–100 °C.