Data acquisition systems shrink to 6mm square

A pair of low-noise, low-cost data acquisition microsystems are claimed to provide the industry's best performance and value for demanding applications.

Texas Instruments has released a pair of low-noise, low-cost data acquisition microsystems in tiny 6 x 6mm QFN packages from its Burr-Brown product line.

The new mixed-signal devices are claimed to provide the industry's best performance and value for demanding applications in industrial process control, portable instrumentation, and test and measurement.

The MSC1201 (24bit) and MSC1202 (16bit) integrate a very low-noise delta-sigma analogue-to-digital convertor (ADC), an enhanced 8051 processor core, 4 or 8Kbyte of Flash memory, 8bit current digital-to-analogue convertor, on-chip oscillator, voltage reference and a variety of high-performance peripherals.

"The MSC1201 and MSC1202 raise the bar for mixed-signal devices by providing a complete data acquisition system in a 6 x 6mm package with the industry' s best performance and value".

"The flexibility of a pin-compatible resolution path along with advanced packaging and integration will be attractive to a wide range of high-performance, space-constrained applications", said Robert Schreiber, Product Line Manager for TI's microsystem data convertor products.

The enhanced 8051 core executes up to three times faster, with lower power, than the standard 8051 core.

The MSC1201 and MSC1202 offers two Flash memory sizes with pin and function compatibility, thus allowing the customer to freely migrate between devices as their code requirements change.

The noise performance of the MSC1201's ADC is 75nV, better than most stand-alone ADCs on the market and significantly better than any comparable mixed-signal device.

The MSC1201's ADC also has a 1Ksample/s sampling rate with only 3mW of power consumption.

The MSC1202's ADC offers 16bit noise free performance at low datarates and can run faster than 2Ksample/s.

Inside the MSC1201 and MSC1202 The analogue features consist of a 24bit delta-sigma ADC (MSC1201) or 16bit delta-sigma ADC (MSC1202), a flexible six-channel multiplexer, internal oscillator, PLL, burn-out detect, selectable buffered input, offset DAC, programmable gains of up to 128, selectable data output rate, programmable single-cycle settling filter, precision on-chip voltage reference or external differential voltage reference, on-chip temperature sensor, on-chip calibration, low voltage detect and brown-out reset.

The digital features include an enhanced 8051 microcontroller core with dual data pointers, two Flash memory size options, 256byte of SRAM, four I/O ports, a 32bit accumulator/shifter, UART, two timers/counters, basic I2C interface, basic SPI interface and a watchdog timer.

The MSC1201 and MSC1202 come in QFN-36 packages and are available now from TI and its authorised distributors.

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