To help industrial automation engineers achieve accurate measurements, Maxim Integrated Products recently introduced the MAXREFDES67# analogue front end (AFE) universal input for their system designs Micro PLC. As high resolution systems move to higher bit counts, they become more sensitive to noise, making such systems difficult to build and maintain accuracy. MAXREFDES67# is a 24-bit AFE reference design that overcomes this challenge.
Maxim’s Suhel Dhanani, Sr. Principal MTS, Control & Automation Strategy, sat down with TMC at Silicon Valley Editor’s Day and had this to say: “Our chips go into most of these systems that enable this so we see this in a really unique perspective. We are the first guys consulted when the systems are being architected, so we see the whole system architecture changes for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).”
MAXREFDES67# universal analogue input is capable of accepting four different signals, requires no jumpers and is 100 percent software configurable. In order to meet Industry 4.0 requirements, Maxim partnered with Wurth Electronics Midcom to customize a power isolation transformer that is energy efficient and compact enough to fit in Maxim's credit-card sized Micro PLC form factor.
MAXREFDES67# Key Advantages are its:
- High accuracy: Effective resolution of up to 22.3 bits with a temperature error as low as ±0.1 percent across a range of -40°C to 150°C.
- Ease of use: Beyond-the-Rails signal chain reduces board space, component count, and cost.
- Flexible: Its universal input accepts four different signals—voltage, current, resistance temperature detector and thermocouple.
“IIoT is the latest wave of technological change to bring unprecedented opportunities to business, according to Dhanani, “There’s a lot of data in factories, data which can be collected via sensors everywhere. It becomes big data that can be used by software to try and optimize operations to predict the failure of a component, so it can be fixed without any down time. Basically you’re just trying to optimize the operations, which is the key thing driving it.”
Maxim is making technology smaller, smarter and more energy efficient to help their customers meet the demands of an integrated world.
Edited by
Kyle Piscioniere
