Tools to Facilitate Sensor AFE Design

摘要

Sensors are found in a wide variety of devices ranging from cell phones (there are as many as 14 in a smartphone-from accelerometers and gyroscopes to front- and rear-mounted image- sensing cameras) to industrial equipment to medical devices. All are complex systems that require circuitry tuning to convert the analog signals produced by the sensor itself into a signal appropriate for a microcontrollers (MCU) analog-to-digital converter (ADC). In the past, systems engineers were required to use discrete operational amplifiers, analog-to-digital converters, and passive components to design sensor systems, but this proved to be time consuming, difficult to accomplish, and expensive.