Multisensor interface IC uses 30?W of power

ZMD AG and ZMD America launched the first member of its MULti-Sensor IC (MUSiC) semiconductor family—the ZMD21013, which is a low-power multichannel device aimed at MCU-based mobile electronic products.

Applications include consumer, medical and industrial products requiring multiple sensors.

The ZMD21013 integrates an analog front-end, including a programmable gain amplifier, a 16bit delta-sigma ADC and a power-saving analog sampling architecture. Based on its highly integrated design, the ZMD21013 can reduce the average overall BOMs and power consumption of an entire sensor-based system, according to ZMD. As a result, it consumes 25-30?W of power on average during normal operations and less than 1?W in idle mode.

Beyond the common signal measurement mode, the ZMD21013 supports an additional temperature measurement mode and an auto-zero mode, which allows monitoring of long-term stability drifts and offsets for compensation and correction purposes.

The ZMD21013 ASSP contains an on-chip clock generator and a 16x8bit EEPROM to store non-volatile configuration data, calibration coefficients, and an optional user-programmable identification. An SPI-compatible serial interface connects the ZMD21013 to the customer's specific external MCU or DSP. The ZMD21013 can be ordered for consumer (0°C to 70°C) as well as for industrial temperature ranges (-25°C to 85°C).

The devices are available in TSSOP20 (4.4mm x 4.6mm) packages.

Pricing starts at $2.10 in volumes of 1,000 devices or more. Sampling of devices will start in Q1 with volume quantities expected in Q2 08.

- Ismini Scouras
eeProductCenter