Intersil Corporation and Freescale Semiconductor have jointly developed a new thermocouple and strain gauge solution for high precision measurement and fast, low power data processing for advanced designs.
The new board features two sensor applications using Intersil’s precision and power products along with the Freescale Kinetis L series microcontroller with a Cortex M0+ core.
The platform consists of two separate boards, the Intersil precision and power products application board and Freescale’s Freedom development platform.
The companies advise this thermocouple design uses a K-type thermocouple with cold junction compensation. It features a zero drift amplifier, voltage reference, DCP, a 24-bit delta sigma converter and Freescale’s KL25Z MCU, featuring 128KB flash and 16KB SRAM onboard.
The strain gauge design extracts a small sensor signal from a high voltage common mode signal of 10V or higher.
The design uses Intersil’s 40V instrumentation amplifier, voltage reference, a 24-bit delta sigma converter and the microcontroller for data acquisition and processing of measurement data, as well as using the onboard USB ports to make the data available, for example, a display or similar.
The thermocouple temperature or applied strain can be monitored using a GUI on the computer powering the demo through the mini USB cable.
Intersil Corporation
