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PSoC Analog Compressor Slide 6

This slide looks at some of the design problems engineers face when dealing with systems such as these. The next generation of products and systems require multiple sensors, and designing such systems with multiple sensors is difficult. One common approach is to go buy digital sensors that simply give an output value over a serial communication interface. While those are easy to work with, they are not very customizable and they typically fail to meet the performance criteria for several of these designs, like the sensitivity or accuracy. Industry experts validate the fact that sensing in the analog domain is required to have the type of performance, accuracy, and resolution that applications need, and digital sensors just do not cut it anymore. Of course working in the analog domain is much harder, there needs to be multiple pieces like an analog front end, analog filers, and digital converters to ensure that good clean signals are coming out of sensors. As more and more analog sensors are added, engineers must buy specialized ICs for each of them, specialized analog front ends, analog and filters. As more and more chips are added to the design, not only is the BOM cost increased, but also PCB board size and the complexity of the design. So making consumer products like wearables becomes very difficult because engineers are constrained on 3 different fronts. Finally, because of the complexity in the analog domain of sensing, and the fact that many of these sensor types are new and groundbreaking, it is difficult to get the design right the first time. The designers of these end products go through several iterations of product development and design to perfect their sensor front ends and to perfect their sensor data, and this requires multiple cycles of learning and hardware changes and board spins or respins, and of course accommodating last minute features. The PSoC Analog Coprocessor is in a position to solve and address these problems. Firstly, the PSoC Analog coprocessor simplifies the design of such systems that require analog front ends, using programmable analog block and components, and the fact that the provided components allow fully complete solutions for initialization, calibration, and temperature correction and compensation of sensor algorithms. There are components in PSoC that make meaningful sense of the raw data captured from these analog signals. So, raw voltage values are not only captured, but actually calibrated temperature values or humidity values come out of that raw data. The Analog Coprocessor delivers a high amount of integration in an extremely low cost coprocessor which is also extremely small in packet size, this chip is barley 3.7 by 2 mm x and y, and can support up to 38 analog sensors. In most real world designs, this product usually senses in the range of 10-12 different sensors that use multiple different I/Os. The PSoC Analog coprocessor also allows updates of sensor features and capabilities in the end product, without impacting the host or main processor with any software changes. Because all of the sensor responsibilities have been offloaded to a dedicated chip, anytime it is needed for any sensors to be added or subtracted from the system, the main host processor firmware does not need to be changed, all that needs to happen is to have the host processor accept an additional data input, or delete one that is not needed anymore. The value is in making minor changes to the coprocessor, rather than making major changes to the main host. Finally, because PSoC Creator allows for hardware and firmware co-design in a software tool, where designs of analog circuits are done using mouse clicks and graphical schematics, means the PSoC chip can be reprogrammed over and over multiple times without having to make various different PCB spins. This is a huge advantage in this domain, especially when it is expensive and time consuming to make a new piece of hardware every time there is a cycle of learning or design iteration. So in summary, as mentioned a couples time already, the PSoC Analog coprocessor allows for creation of small and low cost analog coprocessors for systems that have multiple sensors using effective programmable analog technology.

PTM Published on: 2016-10-26