Custom hardware IEEE 1451.2 implementation for smart transducers

The heterogeneity of sensor interfaces has caused the creation of the IEEE 1451.2 standard. This standard proposes a common digital interface for all sensors and a set of instructions to communicate with them. Following this standard, smart networked sensors can become a reality. In addition to the interface functions, an electronic data sheet is included for sensor self-identification in order to ease the process of including new sensors in a network. This work proposes a custom hardware implementation of this standard using a hardware description language, different from the most common implementations based on microcontrollers. The main advantages are full scalability and configurability, technology independence and ease of integration in larger systems.