Fast Prototyping Flow for Sensor Interfaces

Sensor applications require always more performing sensors together with size, power and area reduction. For this reason a platform based design has been developed in order to implement an intelligent sensor interface (ISIF) for conditioning several kinds of MEMS (micro electro mechanical system) sensors. This system is composed of an analog front end and a digital section: analog blocks perform signal acquisition and basic conditioning functions, while few digital IPs perform usually needed digital signal processing such as modulation/demodulation and sine wave generation. A 32-bit RISC (reduced instruction set computer) processor is also present to implement via software all the digital signal processing (DSP) functions not included in hardware, manage system configuration and provide communication resources. Both analog and digital IPs (intellectual property) are highly programmable, as well as their interconnections, in order to provide a wide range of data paths. Several DSP software routines have also been implemented, replicating the behavior of hardware IPs. In this way ISIF can fast prototype a new sensor interface straight in its application field, drastically shortening the development time of full-hardware optimized sensor interfaces