Atmel Family of Revolutionary Digital Temperature Sensors Improves System Reliability, Reduces System Cost

Digital temperature sensors have excellent accuracy and can measure temperatures over a wide range compared to other technologies such as thermocouples, thermistors and resistive thermal devices (RTDs). Additionally, digital temperature sensors can directly control other circuits in the system to offload the requirements in the microcontroller (MCU). The new Atmel temperature sensor family integrates 2K-, 4K- and 8K-bits of Serial EEPROM memory to store system parameters and user preference data. The user can then access the EEPROM, which is fully functional and drop-in compatible with industry standard I2C serial EEPROMs.

Previous generation temperature sensors had to be set up by the microcontroller each time the system boots, said Kerry Maletsky, product line director, Atmel Corporation. With the new Atmel family of digital temperature sensors, a system can automatically power up in the right state, so the microcontroller doesn't have to do anything to support the temperature sensing capability. By eliminating this extra step, system designers can reduce their overall time-to-market, use less power, and improve the reliability of the system.

The Atmel AT30TS750 family includes a group of five high-precision, digital temperature sensor devices that are based on the industry-standard xx75 functionality offered by a number of vendors. The inclusion of nonvolatile registers to permanently store device configuration settings offers system designers superior flexibility. All devices in the family measure and monitor temperature to address the thermal monitoring requirements of a wide variety of applications. The parts are highly configurable to support a wide range of system applications.