Tap your phone, not your wallet
In mass production, the Kionix ultra-low current MEMS Accelerometer KXTJ3-1057 from Willow Technologies operates with tiny current consumption down to 1.5uA at 0.781Hz Output Data Rate (ODR). Other modes available at higher ODR of 25Hz and 50Hz, offer the design engineer ultra-low 6uA & 10uA current consumption options, saving on product battery life, extending device usage between charges.
The KXTJ3-1057 is a tri-axis MEMS Accelerometer with user-configurable ODR’s from 0.781Hz to 1,600Hz and 8bit, 12bit & 14bit resolution modes. It is designed with extended user configurable g-ranges of ±2g, ±4g, ±8g, & ±16g with an I2C digital communications interface, running at up to 3.4Mhz. It incorporates a high resolution wake-up function, threshold configurable down to 3.9mg.
Bhupinder Randhawa, Senior Sales Engineer at Willow commented, “These silicon micromachined accelerometers have a small footprint of just 2 x 2 x 0.9mm in an LGA package making them ideally suited for consumer wearable devices, wake-up & tap functions in mobile, gaming and smart devices, tags (tracking), industrial monitoring, IoT, toys - motion control and interactive gesture control, tilt & motion sensing in utility meters and in white goods.”
The sense element, fabricated using Kionix’s proprietary plasma micromachining process technology, is hermetically sealed at the wafer level. This is achieved by bonding a second silicon lid wafer to the device using a glass frit. A separate ASIC device included with the sense element provides signal conditioning and digital communication.
Randhawa continued, “Acceleration sensing is based on the principle of a differential capacitance which stems from acceleration-induced motion of the sense element, which further utilizes common mode cancellation to minimise errors from process variation, environmental stress and temperature.”
I2C digital protocol is used to communicate with the chip to configure the part and monitor outputs. The accelerometer operates from a 1.71 VDC to 3.6 VDC supply and voltage regulators maintain constant internal operating voltages throughout the range of input supply, resulting in stable operating characteristics through the range of input supply voltages. Ratiometric error is virtually undetectable.
“Kionix continue to excel in keeping ahead of the fast changing world of wearable technology and mobile devices, providing consistently reliable accelerometers, helping designers to provide end users with lighter, smaller, more efficient electronic gadgets that can last far longer without the need for recharge.” concluded Randhawa.