By integrating analog and digital cores on the same piece of silicon, the Burr-Brown Division of Texas Instruments created a low-cost and high-performance precision data-acquisition system-on-a-chip. The MSC1200 delivers performance levels for in industrial process control, portable instrumentation, and test and measurement applications.
Residing on-chip are a 24-bit sigma-delta ADC, an enhanced 8051 processor core, an offset DAC, flash memory, a precision voltage reference oscillator, an eight-channel multiplexer, a PLL, a PGA with gains up to 128, and a temperature sensor. It also contains selectable buffered inputs and selectable output data rates, a programmable single-cycle settling filter, on-chip calibration, and low-voltage detection and brownout reset capabilities.
Specifications include low noise of 75 nV and a 1-ksample/s rate. Two flash-memory size options are available: 4 or 8 kbytes. The microcontroller core contains two dual data pointers, 128 bytes of SRAM, four I/O ports, a 32-bit accumulator, a universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter (UART) port, two timer/counters, I2C and serial peripheral interfaces, and a watchdog timer.
The MSC1200 comes in a 48-pin TQFP, operating from a single power supply of 2.7 V to 4.25 V and dissipating 3 mW. In 1000-unit lots, it costs $5.95 each (MSC1200Y2 with 4 kbytes of flash memory) and $6.45 each (MSC1200Y3 with 8 kbytes of flash memory).
Texas Instruments Inc. www.ti.com