austriamicrosystems launches new contactless Hall-sensor IC
13 December, 2010
category: Contactless
Analog IC manufacturer austriamicrosystems announced its new AS5013, a contactless magnetic encoder IC for portable communication devices.
The AS5013 Hall-sensor IC is used in the EasyPoint module, which consists of a mechanical stack incorporating a navigation knob, a magnet and the AS5013 magnetic encoder IC. The IC monitors the displacement of a magnet incorporated in a knob relative to its center position and provides x and y position information via an I²C interface.
The AS5013 is a complete Hall-sensor IC for human-machine interface (HMI) applications requiring low power. According to austriamicrosystems, this simplifies software integration challenges for joystick navigation in products such as cell phones, MP3 players, PDAs, GPS receivers, Digital Still Cameras, gaming consoles and remote controls.
The AS5013 includes user-selectable power-saving modes, 5 integrated Hall sensing elements for detecting up to ±2 mm lateral displacement, a high-resolution analog-to-digital converter (ADC), an XY coordinate and motion detection engine, and a smart power management controller. The XY coordinate registers and magnetic field information for each Hall-sensor element are transmitted over the I²C interface to the host processor.
The device also provides two interrupt modes (motion detect, data ready) and two operating modes: idle mode, with less than 3 µA current consumption, and low-power mode, with selectable readout rate. The low-power AS5013 operates over a power supply range of 2.7 to 3.6 V, and down to 1.7 V peripheral supply voltage.