Platform Based Design for Automotive Sensor Conditioning

TL;DR

This paper presents a platform-based design architecture for automotive sensor conditioning, integrating analog and digital components to enhance performance and reduce development time, demonstrated through a case study on a gyro yaw rate sensor.

Contribution

The paper introduces a flexible platform architecture combining analog front-end and microcontroller-based digital processing for automotive sensors, improving performance and development efficiency.

Findings

Performance exceeds current commercial devices

Flexible platform supports various sensor types

Reduces time-to-market for automotive sensor systems

Abstract

In this paper a general architecture suitable to interface several kinds of sensors for automotive applications is presented. A platform based design approach is pursued to improve system performance while minimizing time-to-market.. The platform is composed by an analog front-end and a digital section. The latter is based on a microcontroller core (8051 IP by Oregano) plus a set of dedicated hardware dedicated to the complex signal processing required for sensor conditioning. The microcontroller handles also the communication with external devices (as a PC) for data output and fast prototyping. A case study is presented concerning the conditioning of a Gyro yaw rate sensor for automotive applications. Measured performance results outperform current state-of-the-art commercial devices.