Sensing Temperatures in the Field Using FRAM Microcontrollers

Bruce Schreiner posted 2013-12-05

Texas Instruments has sponsored the following story

The TI MSP430 low-power, FRAM, mixed signal microcontroller family is perfect for industrial automation and process-control designs. A compact, low-power, temperature monitoring field transmitter could easily be realized with the chips' internal I/O and non-volatile memory.

The TI MSP430FR57xx family provides the 16-bit processing power and I/O features to implement sophisticated smart sensors and field transmitters for industrial automation or process control. As a field transmitter, the MSP430 can linearize the temperature signals from an RTD, thermistor, or thermocouple and send it in analog or digital form via 4-20mA, serial, network, or WiFi to a PLC or PAC.

Temperature sensing microcontroller solutions for thermistors, thermocouples, RTDs, and semiconductor vary widely. However, the MSP430 has the necessary processing power, instruction-types, memory, I/O, and communication methods to implement industrial low-power solutions for all of these devices.

The major advantage of MSP430FR57xx is FRAM memory for program and data storage. Flash memory, due to its non-volatility and advantages over EEPROM, quickly became the program memory storage choice of most microcontrollers. FRAM is set to repeat that trend by replacing both program and data memory. FRAM has all the features of Flash, but allows for random access reading and writing to the bit level. FRAM writes are also much faster than Flash at approximately 100ns word write times.

TI refers to FRAM-based microcontrollers as universal memory because it is used as program or data storage. Therefore data loggers, which have small code storage requirements, can use the free FRAM to log data without losing information when power is lost. The flexibility afforded by using the same type of memory for program and data storage makes the MSP430FR57xx quite unique and useful.

TI has made it easy to evaluate MSP430 MCUs with embedded FRAM memory with the MSP-EXP430FR5739 Experimenter Board.  This easy-to-use development platform includes a 3-axis accelerometer, NTC Thermistor, 8 display LEDs and comes preloaded with out-of-box demo code to evaluate the benefits of embedded FRAM memory, including maximum write speed, flash write speed emulation, and two fast sampling modes.

These additional links should also help get you going:

Texas Instruments has sponsored promotion of their industrial communications solutions on ENGINEERING.com. They have no editorial input to this post - all opinions are mine. Bruce Schreiner.