The aim of this paper is to present an acquisition system featuring a very wide gain range and experimental measurements of a new micromachined thermal conductivity detector (μ TCD), applied downstream of a gas-chromatography (GC) system. We describe a simple and innovative electronics for μTCD control and data acquisition, outlining its resistance control, native imbalance compensation, and automatic gain control (AGC) algorithm. The acquisition electronics features two parallel amplification stages with programmable gain: a high-gain stage (gain: 70-1280) and a low-gain or attenuating stage (gain: 0.6-30). The resulting detection range turns out to be very wide, with full scales ranging between 3.9 mV and 6.5 V while voltage is acquired with a 10-b-resolution analog-to-digital converter. Measurements and sensitivity tests have been carried out by connecting our μTCD and acquisition system …