The Tinker's Toolbox - Andreas Koller of Energy Micro on Sensor Interfaces

Hosted by Alix Paultre, the Tinker’s Toolbox is the Advantage Design Group’s web-based interview show where we talk about the latest technology, components, and design issues for the electronic design engineering community.

In today’s podcast we talk to Andreas Koller, VP of WW Sales and Marketing at Energy Micro and their Low Energy Sensor Interface (LESENSE). LESENSE uses the analog comparators (ACMP) for measurement of sensor signals together with the DAC to generate accurate reference voltages or perform sensor excitation.

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Here is a link to the podcast in case the play button is not visible: Energy Micro Interview

Here is a link to a reference guide to LESENSE technology: Energy Micro LESENCE

LESENSE consists of a sequencer, count and compare block, and a RAM block used for configuration and result storage.

The sequencer handles interaction with other peripherals as well as timing of sensor measurements.
The count and compare block is used to count pulses from ACMP outputs before comparing with a configurable threshold.
To autonomously analyze sensor results, the LESENSE decoder provides possibility to define a finite state machine with up to 16 states, and programmable actions upon state transitions. This allows the decoder to implement a wide range of decoding schemes, for instance quadrature decoding.
The RAM block is used for storage of configuration and measurement results. This allows LESENSE to have a relatively large result buffer enabling the chip to remain in a low energy mode for long periods of time while collecting sensor data.

LESENSE can operate down to energy mode EM2 and up to EM0, and it can wake up the CPU on configurable events.