Increasing Compensation Efficiency By Going Analog
by Tim Warland, Applications Engineer, and Bob Frostholm, Vice President of Marketing, Microbridge Technologies
Compensation is essential in many manufacturing operations as even small variances in components can introduce significant differences in performance and compromise adherence to specifications. Compensation enables manufacturers to adjust otherwise unsuitable products back within customer specifications. The less tolerant a customer’s expectations are, the more accurate the compensation methodology required.
Through compensation, developers can adjust a system to account for component variability, unit-by-unit manufacturing deviation, environmental differences (eg temperature), and degradation/long-term instability. Compensation can alleviate many system issues, including limited operating temperature range, maximum frequency of operation, requirements for power and ground to act like a resistor, limited precision, and manual circuit adjustment. Effectively, any circuit that requires a precise voltage, current, offset, gain, bias, frequency response, etc can benefit from compensation as precision has a direct impact on system performance. For example, a proximity sensor detects the presence of a metal object by its impact on the electromagnetic load across a coil, and the analog sensitivity of the sensor determines how accurate the its digital trigger will be.
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