Integrated PGAs and a low-drift voltage reference enhance the MCP3901 AFE’s ability to measure signals at very small levels, and reduce the number of external components needed. This enables smaller overall designs at lower costs. The phase-delay compensation block enables the MCP3901 AFE to compensate for differences in phase for three-phase energy-metering applications, while the SPI interface provides a simple connection to a microcontroller (MCU) and offers engineers more flexibility with their design. Additionally, through the SPI interface, designers can adjust the ADC over sampling ratio to control the resolution and sample rate as dictated by the needs of the application.
Microchip also announced the MCP3901 Evaluation Board (part # MCP3901EV-MCU16), which enables access to the MCP3901 through various test points, and to a computer through a serial interface. Via user-interface software on their computers, engineers can view the performance of the MCP3901 AFE using various analysis parameters such as SINAD, Effective Number of Bits (ENOB), Total Harmonic Distortion (THD), and Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR).