The fast growth of MEMS technologies for the production of inertial sensors in the last decade makes the characterization at wafer-level very important. In this paper is presented a test setup for measuring electrical and mechanical parameters of capacitive MEMS inertial sensors. The test setup is used in the production for automotive and consumer applications. It is fully electrical (i.e. none of the stimuli to the sensors is mechanical). The core of the test setup is a test algorithm. The design of the test algorithm was aimed at a fast, reliable and repeatable wafer-sort test. With the test setup described in this paper, it is possible to measure electrical and mechanical parameters of inertial sensors with up-to-6 dimensions

In the automotive electronic market, sensor conditioning is one of the driving applications. Sensor solutions are pervasive in the vehicle, while signal processing in such application is getting more and more complex. Currently the design strategy is often the standard ASIC flow, but the design effort can be reduced by automatic or platform-aided design strategies, or by using software-based solutions. In this paper SensASIP platform is presented. It is a design platform targeting a microprocessor architecture enhanced by dedicated instructions for computing intensive sensor signal processing tasks. SensASIP allows a seamless design flow from MATLAB-based algorithm definition and instruction set design and simulation, down to hardware macrocell HDL description and implementation in CMOS technology. SensASIP features are described through two automotive sensor conditioning examples. Special focus is put on its increased flexibility and reduced design-effort vs. standard ASIC design approach and on its low complexity overhead vs. other state-of-art software-based solution

In automotive field the signal processing algorithms implemented on chips is getting more and more complex. This is leading to a growing area of digital blocks of sensor systems and to greater digital design effort. The work presented in this paper has been started in order to have a flexible software-oriented DSP in portfolio, quickly customizable for the current product and with the minimum area overhead. The design platform has three levels: the instruction set emulator model for a fast algorithm implementation and the instruction set definition, the bit-true and cycle-true model of the processor for a fine verification of the application firmware, and the RTL design of a three-stage pipeline μ-processor. The instruction set and the hardware resources of the μ-processor are easily customizable. A case study, a design aided by the platform, is presented. Synthesis results are discussed, being the area constraint one of the most significant

In this paper the modeling activity for the realization of a general architecture suitable to interface a heterogeneous set of magnetic sensors for automotive applications is presented. This work represents the first step of a 'platform based' approach that aims at improving system performance while minimizing time-to-market. In particular, a case study is shown in which 3D Hall sensors have been used; these sensors allow 2D and 3D magnetic field measurements in Cartesian or polar coordinates, position measurements, rotation and tilt measurements and Joystick position measurements. The system has been end-to-end modeled starting from the physical phenomenon, passing through acquisition and conditioning and ending with digital elaboration; then it has been extensively simulated to verify the correctness of its behavior and to identify the metrics for a proper analog\digital\software partitioning

DC/DC applications in automotive market are expected to require new system specifications in next years. Because of the spreading of electrical cars, the power line at 48 V will be very common. Moreover, the converter chips and external passives are required to occupy less area. A DC/DC solution, meeting such requirements, is presented in this work. The switched capacitors architecture is intended to reduce external passive devices space occupation, whereas sustained electrical power is kept high. This paper discusses a preliminary version of the converter, with experimental results from measurements, and presents the final chip architecture, with some simulation result data.