Welcome to the January Analog Dialogue
This month’s featured article, “Surviving the Extremes: Understanding Shock and Vibration in MEMS Sensors,” explores a critical yet often misunderstood aspect of MEMS accelerometer design: the fundamental difference between shock survivability and vibration tolerance. While a sensor may withstand thousands of gs in shock testing, it could fail under just hundreds of gs of continuous vibration—a distinction that can make or break sensor performance in harsh industrial environments. Using Analog Devices’ accelerometers as practical examples, the article explains how these two specifications represent fundamentally different stress profiles and failure mechanisms, and why understanding mechanical headroom, damping, and protective design features is essential for engineers selecting sensors for applications where mechanical stress is constant, from heavy machinery to transportation systems.
“Simplicity Wins—Part 2: Discovering an Efficient Active Balancing Solution for BMS Design” is our next featured article. It examines three widely adopted architectures—flyback, multi-inductor, and switched capacitor—and synthesizes their strengths into an innovative approach that employs shared flyback circuits and an intermediate charge buffer strategy to minimize hardware complexity while maintaining high performance. Notably, it emphasizes pack-to-pack balancing as equally critical as cell-to-cell balancing, especially as battery capacities scale to 1000 Ah and beyond, offering system designers an optimized trade-off among cost, efficiency, and real-world applicability that demonstrates elegant engineering need not sacrifice performance for simplicity.
The next article, “NFC-Enabled Security Solutions: Protecting Medical, Consumer, and Industrial Systems,” explores how NFC-enabled security solutions are transforming the authentication and management of consumables across medical, consumer, and industrial applications. The article demonstrates how ADI’s DeepCover® secure authenticator and transponder leverage SHA-3-based challenge-response authentication to protect critical systems from counterfeit components, unauthorized reuse, and tampering. Through three compelling use cases, readers will discover how NFC technology’s contactless design offers distinct advantages over traditional wired connections and broader wireless methods, providing secure authentication, controlled expiration tracking, and tamper-proof usage monitoring. This practical implementation guide showcases how advanced cryptographic features can enhance safety, reliability, and compliance in applications where product authenticity directly impacts quality and user safety.
This month’s RAQ, “Accurately Sensing High Currents,” presents a practical solution for accurately measuring high currents ranging from single amps to hundreds of amps—well beyond the typical capabilities of standard digital multimeters. The featured circuit leverages ADI’s current-sense amplifier paired with a 50 μΩ shunt resistor to convert small voltage drops into amplified, ground-referenced output signals that can be easily measured with standard equipment. With the ability to measure load currents up to 800 A and handle voltages up to 60 V, this compact solution addresses a critical measurement challenge across applications, all while minimizing power dissipation and maintaining excellent precision even at low current levels.
And as we have for over 59 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.