Smart Analog

Sensing devices play an increasingly important role in many areas of modern life — at our workplace, in industry, at home, as well as our personal mobile devices. In consumer applications, sensor-based electronic control provides us with additional safety, health information, power savings, and overall convenience. And for more complex systems in industry and commercial applications, the trend is toward more intelligent sensors that deliver more precise and "intelligent" data to improve product quality, increase operational savings, and reduce energy consumption.

However, each sensor has its unique electrical characteristics and require painstaking tuning of circuitry to convert weak or varied signals into a value that is usable for a microcontroller (MCU). The challenge then is to have a flexible platform that will allow a user to adapt to varied interface requirements, simplify the tuning process, and have the ability to add intelligence based on the information received.