How to Improve Your Product’s Safety and Reliability Using the World’s Only Digital Temperature Sensors with NVM Registers
Learn how a single channel temperature sensor family with integrated NVM registers can help.
Today’s electronic systems are running faster, but their silicon content continues to increase as well. That means applications are generating more heat than ever before, making real time temperature monitoring now vital to the operation of industrial, consumer, computing, communications and automotive designs, to name a few.
Keep reading to learn how a single channel temperature sensor family with integrated NVM registers can help.
The Basics of Digital Temperature Sensors
A digital temperature sensor (DTS) is a complete temperature monitoring solution that measures its own internal temperature and then converts the temperature into a very accurate digital value that can be easily read via standard I2C protocol communication. I2C digital temperature sensors output digitized temperature data, eliminating the need for any external components such as analog-to-digital converters and data post-processing components.
Additionally, a DTS allows the processor and system bus frequencies to be throttled back when the temperature exceeds a preset limit, which ensures product safety and reliability. In turn, this minimizes the need for cooling fans and heat sinks, which are impractical in many applications today as various markets demand compact product designs. I2C digital temperature sensors have been a popular thermal monitoring solution in countless electronic products and systems. They have helped system designers measure and control their product’s real-time temperatures and effectively react to any over or under temperature limit violations.
Microchip developed the world’s first and only digital temperature sensor family with built-in NVM registers, helping increase a product’s safety and reliability.
So, What Makes Microchip’s Digital Temperature Sensors Different?
Safety
All digital temperature sensors today have user-programmable registers that use volatile memory type registers, which means once power is removed, the register’s stored data values are not saved, meaning volatile memory registers have to be updated upon each system power up and initialization sequence. This creates a high risk and unreliability timing event allowing the opportunity for these registers to be inadvertently misconfigured and set to the wrong settings, which could cause run away heat issues in the product. This problem is solved when using Microchip’s integrated nonvolatile registers.
The AT30TS750A and AT30TSE752A/4A/8A’s built-in NVM registers allow pre-configured power-up settings to minimize MCU power-up involvement and eliminate the risk of misconfigured registers improving the safety and reliability of the system. Additionally, the integrated serial EEPROM enables users to store product preference data, serial numbers, end-customer use tracking and more. The AT30TSE752A/4A/8A devices offer 2-, 4- or 8 Kbits of data storage and include the capability to lock down the memory to protect from accidental erasure.
Reliability
The NVM registers enable the device to store and retain the configuration and temperature limit settings even after the device has been power cycled. The NVM register features are only found in Microchip’s AT30TS750A and AT30TSE752A/4A/8A temperature sensors. The NVM registers eliminate the need for the device to be reconfigured after each power-up operation, thereby allowing the device to run self-contained and not rely upon a host controller for device configuration streamlining the power-up initialization sequence.
The AT30TS750A and AT30TSE752A/4A/8A allow designers to bypass the typical thermal design roadblocks, improving the safety and reliability of an application. For more information, please visit this page.
