A Novel Design Of An NTC Thermistor Linearization Circuit

A novel design of a circuit used for NTC thermistor linearization is proposed. The novelty of the proposed design consists in a specific combination of two linearization circuits, a serial-parallel resistive voltage divider and a two-stage piecewise linear analog-to-digital converter. At the output of the first linearization circuit the quasi-linear voltage is obtained. To remove the residual voltage nonlinearity, the second linearization circuit, i.e., a two-stage piecewise linear analog-to-digital converter is employed. This circuit is composed of two flash analog-to-digital converters. The first analog-to-digital converter is piecewise linear and it is actually performing the linearization, while the second analog-to-digital converter is linear and it is performing the reduction of the quantization error introduced by the first converter. After the linearization is performed, the maximal absolute value of a difference between the measured and real temperatures is 0.014°C for the temperature range between - 25 and 75°C, and 0.001°C for the temperature range between 10 and 40°C.