Welcome to the February issue of Analog Dialogue.
Remember Knight Rider? When I was young, David Hasselhoff and the first autonomous driving car, KITT, appeared on TV. Remember the red laser light in the front of the car? Considered farfetched in those days, now it could be seen as visionary, as it’s closer to reality than fiction. LIDAR, in combination with other sensors, is one of the technologies enabling autonomous moving systems. Further developments in environmental sensing may have a much broader impact on our lives in the future. Environmental sensors will need to connect to wireless networks. Not only will our standard Wi-Fi and 5G systems be used, but proprietary mesh networks will also be implemented. This connectivity will be the key to enabling future seismic measurement systems, condition-based monitoring, and water quality measurement systems. This month’s Analog Dialogue features two articles addressing this vision for the future. I hope you enjoy this issue just as much as I enjoyed watching Michael Knight fight crime using advanced technology in the 1980s.
Back to the articles from Analog Dialogue.
As autonomous vehicles and robots become reality, automotive and industrial customers are seeking new environmental perception solutions to enable these machines. LIDAR is one of the fast-growing technologies in this field and is seeing wider adoption as it becomes more mature and reliable. This article discusses Analog Devices’ new LIDAR prototyping platform and how it helps shorten product development time by providing a complete hardware and software solution.
The second article addresses water quality monitoring systems and the benefits of combining the measurement system and wireless sensors with a robust and reliable wireless network. Several industries like beverage production, pharmaceuticals, and waste water treatment rely on water quality monitoring systems to measure and control important water quality indicators. These include temperature, turbidity, pH, ORD, conductivity, algae and phytoplankton, and more. Electrochemical techniques are used to measure these water quality indicators. Aside from the sensor and the measurement unit itself, the wireless network plays a vital role. While individual wired sensors are commonly deployed across building facilities, they frequently need to be cleaned and calibrated, and often replaced. Wireless networks can reduce this burden.
Powering automotive electronics is not trivial. The variety of electrical and mechanical systems that interface with the vehicle’s battery can cause, what one might assume to be, a relatively stable 12 V supply to spike from –300 V to +150 V over short periods of time. When contending with ISO 7367-2, ISO 16750-2, or similar automaker-specific standards, a new 4-switch buck-boost dc-to-dc controller offers a solution with a 2.8 V to 100 V input operating range, built-in reverse battery protection, and its new Pass-ThruTM operating mode. The new Pass-Thru mode improves the buck-boost operation. In the absence of switching, this means no EMI and no switching losses, making efficiencies greater than 99.9% easy to achieve.
Many semiconductor manufacturer data sheets specify the current noise of an amplifier in the specification tables, typically at a frequency of 1 kHz. It isn’t always clear where the current noise specifications come from. Is it measured or is it theoretical? This rarely asked question provides insights into the reasons why your design might be noisier at higher frequencies.
In this month’s StudentZone article, we introduce the operational amplifier (op amp) in switching mode configuration to obtain an op amp voltage comparator behavior. The comparison is made using the sign of the difference between the two input voltages at the inverting and noninverting input pin of the op amp. Antoniu Miclaus and Doug Mercer will continue with the ADALM2000 series next month.
And as we have for 54 years, we invite you to be part of the dialogue in Analog Dialogue. You can get in touch through our blog, Facebook page, or email. Let us know how we’re doing and what you’d like to see from us in the coming months.
