Maxim advances analog integration strategy

Maxim Integrated Products Inc. introduced five high-integration products for the factory automation and automotive markets that dramatically improve operating efficiencies and reduce costs. Maxim also announced it has collaborated with two firms to produce a reference design for a telehealth fitness (“Fit”) shirt that monitors vital signs, lowers the cost of medical diagnosis, and represents a new era in preventive medical care that could reduce health care costs by up to 10x. 

Factory Automation

Maxim announced two high-integration products targeted to factory automation:

• The MAX78638 is a turnkey solution for 3-phase motor energy measurement and diagnostics. Unlike previous bulky and expensive solutions that required moving the equipment from motor to motor, the fully integrated MAX78638 contains a microcontroller, compute engine, an analog-to-digital converter (ADC), and flexible and configurable sensor interfaces that allow for the measurement of current, voltage, speed, vibration, position, and temperature. The high-accuracy ADC enables a less than 0.5% energy calculation error compared to the 5% of a standard microprocessor solution. 
• The MAX31865 is the industry’s first fully integrated RTD-to-digital converter, a single-chip solution that lowers costs by up to 50% and solves the common industrial design problem of digitizing a platinum RTD (such as a Pt100 or Pt1000) resistance. It offers simple and accurate measurement of temperature, making it ideal for industrial measurement and process control applications.  

Automotive

Maxim announced three high-integration products targeted to the automotive market:

• The MAX17823 is a fourth-generation high-voltage battery sensor for mission-critical automotive and industrial lithium-ion battery and fuel cell applications. Offering a full suite of proprietary integrated ISO-26262 diagnostic features, the MAX17823 maximizes electric and hybrid electric vehicle driving range, while ensuring battery and fuel cell safety and reliability. Maxim also offers the MAX17830, a second-generation, high-voltage battery-management solution. 
• The MAX9273/MAX9272 (22 bits) and MAX9271/MAX9272 (16 bits) serial-data chipsets transmit over coax cables and lower costs for automotive camera systems by up to 50%. The chipsets reduce power use, process signals faster, and improve electromagnetic emissions compared to standard solutions using Ethernet cables. Maxim’s new camera chipsets operate at very high data rates (1.5Gbps), which is critical for today’s fast video and megapixel image transmissions. Using coax cables, the chipsets do not need to compress data and thus process images immediately—a crucial requirement for safety applications like sign recognition, collision avoidance, and night vision.     

Telehealth 

Maxim announces a new “Fit” shirt that enables medical professionals to perform frequent and less costly fitness monitoring that will lead to more effective preventive medical care. The highly integrated shirt measures 3-lead ECG, body temperature, and motion. All diagnostic tools are packaged in a shirt that is comfortable to wear. The new Fit shirt integrates dry ECG sensor technology, complex signal processing technology, a temperature sensor, motion sensor, an ultra-low-power microcontroller, and wireless electronics.