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PSoC Analog Compressor Slide 5

This slide reviews the current market in the context of embedded systems that have a lot of sensing capabilities. It is fairly commonplace that embedded systems across several domains of consumer and industrial segments, require not just 1 but multiple sensors. Sensors provide intelligence of the surrounding environment as well as measurement of electrical signals. These systems that have multiple sensors must have analog front ends, analog filters, signal processes, and all of the other terms that were defined before, so that they are capable of accurately measuring this analog sensor data. A big trend these days is that all of this analog sensing, or sensing in general, is being offloaded from the main system or main processes, to dedicated processes, essentially giving birth to the term that is commonly known in the industry as sensor hub, a chip that has the dedicated function of interfacing with the sensors, taking meaningful data out of them, and sending them onward to larger host processes. On this slide a few examples of various embedded systems and end products that use multiple sensors, across various different domains can be seen. The first one here is a toxic gas center in which PSoC implements a low cost analog coprocessor by integrating the analog front ends, the analog filters, and the signal processing microcontroller, to measure the toxicity in the environment from the gas. A fairly different example here in the middle in home appliances is a smart refrigerator, where PSoC implements a very similar system but in this case, interfacing with other sensors to enable frost detection. Then a completely different domain, more in the consumer world, a Fitness Band where PSoC implements an analog coprocessor, and is continuously monitoring several different sensors, over half a dozen, including information such as a heart rate monitor, and UV monitor. The PSoC acts as that dedicated chip, which has the task of only taking data from all of these sensors, and then sending it onwards to a larger host processor that runs the main system on a product like this. The key takeaway from this slide is that the analog coprocessor is allowing these next generation products and systems to use not only new types of sensors, but also multiples of them together with improved sensitivity, accuracy, and without drastically increasing the system power budget or system cost.

PTM Published on: 2016-10-26