Texas Instruments Incorporated (NASDAQ:TXN) has launched new microcontrollers which come with a front end that is analog and which allow for lower power consumption and higher accuracy in smart water meters. The Dallas, Texas-based semiconductor maker has also unveiled two new designs which will make the adding of automated meter reading features to mechanical water meters easier.
The new reference designs and microcontrollers have been unveiled at a time when there is an increasing demand for water meters that are more accurate and more efficient to ensure timely billing, higher metering precision and better water resources management.
Intelligent meters
With the new microcontrollers developers will be equipped to add extra intelligence to flow meters since they will be able to take advantage of a waveform capture feature as well as signal processing that is ADC-based. This will allow for measurement that is more accurate compared to other devices. Specifically the precision level is 25 picoseconds even when the flow rates are under one liter per hour.
In the new microcontrollers the component count of the water meter system is cut by 50% while power consumption is reduced by 25%. This allows water meters to operate continuously for a decade or more without having to recharge the battery. To ensure advanced signal processing an accelerator module that is low-energy has been integrated into the new microcontrollers. Other new features include a metering test interface, an LCD driver and FRAM – Ferroelectric Random Access Memory of 256 kilobytes.
Design center
The design center of the new microcontrollers provides a development ecosystem that is comprehensive and speeds up the time it takes for developers to get their products to market. This is made possible by tools that enable customization flexibility and quick development. These tools include digital signal processing libraries, metrology evaluation modules, graphical user interface and software libraries.
Samples of the new microcontrollers can be purchased from the online store of Texas Instruments. An evaluation module and accompanying software can also be requested online from the semiconductors maker’s website.
