How Integrated Features Can Save the Day in Your Temperature Measurement System

Detailed introduction：

Today's electronic systems are running faster, but their silicon content continues to increase as well. That means applications are generating more heat than ever before, making real-time temperature monitoring vital to the operation of industrial, consumer, computing, and communications designs.

In this article, we will discuss an easy and cost-effective way to accurately measure your product's temperature while also deploying unique best-in-class safety and reliability functionality in your system, would you be interested in learning more.

Increasing your product's operational value to your customers, while protecting your investment, is critical to long term success.  This is only available with Microchip's integrated (Non-volatile Memory) NVM temperature sensor family. 

You might be wondering why it is important to use the integrated NMV inside; we will share three important reasons. 

First, integrated NVM use provides the capability to record critical data locally in the temperature sensor. An example of critical data is logging temperature extremes of the end-product that could force system shutdowns or failures, record temperatures, date/time, fault counts, power-on duration and many other things designers would like to avoid. 

Consider the impact to your future product improvements if you could review and study your end customer product failure returns by simply reading the integrated memory inside the temperature sensor. You could learn things like how many times the product reached a critical temperature and the date and time it occurred. This data alone could tell you if your customer operated the product in a consistently harsh temperature environment, perhaps voiding the warranty or any warranty claims due to customer misuse. The integrated memory could be viewed almost like the crash data recorders found in cars and planes today. The stored data could help improve future product development and or product improvements by relating the stored temperature violations to, perhaps a wrong component selection where its performance degraded over time.  

Second, the integrated memory enables the capability to track how your end customers are using your product's features or functions to determine if customers actually use them or not. Perhaps you have new features or specific new functions that you want to try out with customers. This new access to data will allow you do get important information about what your customers are using in your designs. These results could be even more valuable than a customer survey or even a focus group!  

The final reason to use integrated NVM is for critical data storage for factory, system configuration settings and parametric data. The integrated memory could be used to store critical factory testing information about how the product was tested to certain test program revision. The test setup and equipment location, along with its parametric data, would help on customer product returns by providing unbiased information on how the product was factory tested. In addition, the integrated memory could be used to store critical system configuration data that helps the power up and initialization process to configure the system or product. The value here is that future product upgrades could be done by simply reprogramming the previous configuration data in one simple programming operation. 

The AT30TSE752A/754A/758A contain the world's only set of nonvolatile registers to retain the configuration and temperature limit settings even after the device has been power cycled, thereby eliminating the need for the device to be reconfigured after each power-up operation. This additional flexibility permits the device to run self-contained and not rely upon a host controller for device configuration.

In addition, these devices contain a full array write protection feature via the Reversible Software Write Protect (RSWP) mode that once enabled, disables the EEPROM write circuitry and therefore, protects the contents of the entire memory array against any intentional or unintentional write operations. 

A temperature sensor with integrated EEPROM, such as the AT30TSE758A from Microchip, enables manufacturers to take advantage of the three core benefits discussed above. Precise temperature monitoring devices combine a high-precision digital temperature sensor, programmable high and low temperature alarms, integrated nonvolatile registers and 8 Kbit EEPROM into a single compact package. These features make it applicable for use in a wide variety of applications like consumer, industrial and computing that require measurement of local temperatures as an integral part of the system’s function and reliability.  

Conclusion

Using integrated NVMs that complement your thermal management endeavors is extremely important, and we hope this article has helped explain why. Microchip is committed to this market segment, which is why we've created the AT30TSE752A/4A/8A product line, which allows designers to bypass the typical thermal design roadblocks, improving the safety and reliability of an application. 

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