Andover, MA. MEMSIC Inc. today announced a new family of acceleration and tip-over sensor components that includes four new sensors, the MXD6240 and MXD6241AU, MXC6244AU, and MXC6245XU.
These new sensors provide tip-over and acceleration sensing in a range of automotive, industrial, and consumer applications, such as motorcycle and off-road vehicle tip-over detection, vehicle navigation, and digital SLR camera horizontal-position detection.
“For years, high vibration environments have caused problems for accelerometers, forcing customers to widen the full-scale range of the accelerometer to prevent clipping and move to a more powerful and expensive microprocessor capable of higher sampling rates and heavy filtering needed prevent aliasing and recover the signal of interest,” said James Fennelly, MEMSIC product marketing manager. “The 624x family gives customers a new cost effective choice that works well in these high-vibration environments, and is the only accelerometer with these unique vibration-filtering properties.”
The 624x family uses MEMSIC’s proprietary thermal accelerometer technology that utilizes heated gas molecules to sense acceleration instead of a mechanical beam structure; the transducer exhibits a natural low-pass frequency response with virtually no mechanical resonance and extremely high accuracy over a range of temperatures. This makes the devices suited to harsh and/or high vibration environments, where competing sensor solutions can exhibit false readings or other errors due to resonance.
The MXD6240 and MXD6241AU are autonomous inclination sensors with eight built-in, pin-programmable tip-over angle thresholds from 40 to 70 degrees, making them suitable for tip-over applications where no microcontroller is available. If the device orientation with respect to vertical exceeds the programmed threshold angle, the digital output changes state to alert the system to a tip-over or fall-down event. In addition to the transducer’s inherent low-pass response, an internal anti-vibration filter provides > 45-dB attenuation above 25 Hz, and > 60-dB attenuation above 50 Hz.
The MXC6244AU and MXC6245XU are complete 2-axis I2C interface accelerometers each with 1 mg of resolution. The MXC6244AU is ±8g full-scale-range device. It includes the internal anti-vibration filter and the eight angle thresholds. They are programmable through the I2C interface.
The MXC6245XU is a ±2g full-scale-range device and is targeted at cost-sensitive applications not requiring the programmable anti-vibration filter or the eight programmable tip-over angle thresholds. It offers 12 bits of resolution (1 mg) and has the same outstanding over temperature bias performance of typically 0.1 mg/C.
The 624x family offers a full range of functionality, features, and performance to serve the diverse needs of different applications. The fully autonomous MXD6240/41 eliminate the need for a microcontroller and can replace older mechanical pendulum solutions in motorcycles and off-road vehicles. The MXC6244AU can be used directly in engine control units (ECUs) for the same application, thereby allowing for the elimination of a separate tip-over module.
Devices pre-mounted on prototyping boards can be purchased directly from MEMSIC. Designers can evaluate and log data using MEMSIC’s Universal Evaluation Board.
The company was on hand at Sensors Expo this week to highlight its complete product line.