1.7 Integrated Peripherals and Sensor Interfacing
An OPA is the basic building block to implement the signal conditioning circuits. Along with the OPA, few passive components, sensor excitation and offset/bias voltages are required for a sensor interface. The ADC peripheral converts the conditioned voltage signal into digital values for further processing. If a microcontroller has built-in OPA, ADC, CMP and DAC, then interfacing a sensor to the microcontroller is easy and less time consuming.
The availability of 12-bit differential ADCC, 8-bit DAC and OPA in the PIC16F17146 family of microcontrollers helps to interface a wide range of sensors. The CPU of PIC16F17146 family of microcontrollers offers good computation capabilities and operates with a supply voltage in the range of 1.8V to 5V. Therefore, most of the sensors can be interfaced directly without any signal attenuation circuits. All the analog peripherals can be configured to connect to each other internally. Their combination makes it easy to interface a sensor with the microcontroller.
The following section highlights the intelligent analog peripherals available in the PIC16F17146 family of microcontrollers.