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I3C® Controller for Sensor Hub feature in MEMS sensors

Luigi Asquino

I3C® Controller for Sensor Hub feature in MEMS sensors.

Rel. Guido Masera, Paolo Rosingana, Eyuel Zewdu Teferi. Politecnico di Torino, Corso di laurea magistrale in Ingegneria Elettronica (Electronic Engineering), 2024

Abstract:

In semiconductor industries an important role is given by MEMS sensors. These devices are microscaled sensors that combine mechanical and electronic properties, in order to measure and convert physical quantities to digital data. Their importance stems from the need of modern digital technology to integrate a large number of sensors into portable devices in order to accomplish advanced tasks like human gesture recognition, activity detection and biometrical measures. This leads to a large market demand of scalable and ultra-low consuming devices capable of sensing external information with an utmost accuracy. Because of the increasing complexity and functionalities in modern electronics, latest sensors started integrating the capability of executing advanced algorithms with a sensor hub, allowing for power advantages and system complexity reduction. Sensor hub allows to read data from multiple sensors, so that collected information can be processed by embedded algorithms along with data from sensor itself. In this way the device can rely on merged data from more than one sensor, enabling to achieve better performances. Digital electronics exploits serial communications to transfer data between different modules. Many serial protocols are available, most common ones are: SPI, I2C and UART. Each of these protocols is very different from the others and has peculiar features and disadvantages. This fragmentation leads to a hardware complexity overhead, since every device must integrate dedicated interfaces and physical pins for each protocol. MIPI I3C® is a serial protocol developed to overcome limitations of the aforementioned serial protocols. This protocol is realized as an optimized version of the older I2C protocol, hence its protocol name: "Improved I2C". The interesting aspect is that it merges best features of existing protocols while introduces new ones. Moreover it supports a backward compatibility with I2C. The thesis proposal is required to evaluate and deliver an I3C® controller that could initialize and communicate with sensors on the sensor hub bus for data aggregation. The sensor hub design is implemented on a 6-axis IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit). The final requirement is to ensure that a 3.2 kHz data gathering can be sustained from at least four sensors on the sensor hub bus. The thesis work is structured on four primary activities. The first step is the theoretical study of the architecture of the 6-axis IMU and the I3C® protocol. The second step is defining the best way to add the required I3C® controller to the existing system. This step includes the RTL design of the protocol. In this activity step, required features and mandatory specification are investigated in order to make best design choices. The third step is the integration of the designed module into the existing system for control and optimal use. In this part it is defined how the controller will be integrated and how it communicates with other interfaces. The communication includes the definition of dedicated registers to support the behavior of the I3C® controller, and how the control signals are communicated to the I3C® controller via the embedded MCU. The last step consists in FPGA prototyping. This activity is used as a final verification step: once the circuit has been tested by using simulation softwares, then a FPGA board is exploited to check the correct behavior of the designed module in a real-world application.

Relatori: Guido Masera, Paolo Rosingana, Eyuel Zewdu Teferi
Anno accademico: 2024/25
Tipo di pubblicazione: Elettronica
Numero di pagine: 116
Informazioni aggiuntive: Tesi secretata. Fulltext non presente
Soggetti:
Corso di laurea: Corso di laurea magistrale in Ingegneria Elettronica (Electronic Engineering)
Classe di laurea: Nuovo ordinamento > Laurea magistrale > LM-29 - INGEGNERIA ELETTRONICA
Aziende collaboratrici: STMICROELECTRONICS srl
URI: http://webthesis.biblio.polito.it/id/eprint/33811
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