The design of a tilt sensing companion chip for accelerometers

Abstract

This study describes the work of implementing tilt sensing for accelerometers into the patented companion chip architecture. The core hardware block for transforming acceleration into tilting angles is based on a patented low complexity algorithm and hence the gate count takes only a few thousands for the whole chip. The chip cannot only replace the role of an accelerometer providing acceleration information but also extra tilting information. Hence, the chip can totally off-load the burden of a micro-controller for the needs of streaming acceleration data from accelerometers, calculating tilt angles, and/or retrieving tilting information from another piece of HW. The features of the chip make it easy to integrate into any system whereas the tilting information is required.