Nanopower Circuit Design in Low-Frequency Sensor Applications

Conditioning sensor outputs as power consumption (supply voltage and/or supply current) levels decrease is a design engineering challenge. Reduced power consumption is an important system-level issue and may outweigh electrical performance with respect to speed and/or accuracy. Engineers must find the lowest supply current components at a given supply voltage or the lowest supply current components that can operate on the lowest supply voltage the system design can tolerate. This application note discusses how to identify an op amp for a low-frequency sensor application where the right combination of DC specifications and very low power operation are required to perform low-voltage, low-current sensor signal conditioning.