 Hi, I'm MPI. Hi, I'm MPI, brought to you by Digikey. This week, it is ST Lady Aida. What is I'm MPI of the week this week? OK. This week, it is the T. Oh, you'll have to click on the link, because I've got to go. Yeah, I've got to go. Yeah, can you click on them? Yeah. OK. The TSC 1641. I'm going to make sure I get the part number correctly. This is from ST. You can even see the ST logo on the chip. I think this is their first digital power monitoring chip. So they're kind of getting into this new industry. ST has done a lot of sensors and, of course, microcontrollers. But I think this is their first power monitor. And it's definitely the first, like, MIPI i3C one, I think, which I thought was kind of interesting. So this is a power monitor for up to 60 volts, 16-bit ADC built-in for monitoring voltage, power, and current. Very, very small, 3 by 3 millimeter DFN10. And it has both i2C and i3C interfaces, which is kind of neat. So it's starting to see i3C make it into some chips. So the traditional way of, if you want to measure the current going through a device is in the olden days, you would use an analog system like this, where kind of in the middle, you see there's a 0.1 ohm resistor. And you use a precision op amp that can go as low to rail to the ground rail. And you can add some gain, looks like a 47-time gain, on the voltage across that resistor. And then you can calculate the ampere is going through your load. And then you can take the voltage and use a resistor provider on the top to get the voltage from a high voltage down to your analog input. And then you can read it with a microcontroller. Now you've got low side monitoring and voltage monitoring. And then you can calculate the power, which is super great and everything except for two things. One, a lot of components. And you can only do low side easily. It's hard to do high side. You can kind of do it by using an op amp that can be that high. Otherwise, it gets very complicated with the common voltage. And second, you need two analog inputs. Maybe you don't want that. And third, it's not as easy to set up interrupts or have low power because you have to have the op amp and the resistor provider constantly on, which is why this is a cool chip. So this chip has a differential input that is safe up to 60-volt common mode. So you can do either high side or low side measurements. It'll measure both the load and the voltage across a very small resistor that's either placed again at the top or at the bottom of the power rail. And then you can read it 16-bit ADC. There's two of them, one for voltage, one for current. You can read that. You can do power calculations, set alerts, read the temperature, all sorts of stuff. And it all comes through I squared C or I3C with an optional alert pin for easy use. And then there's two address pins. So of course, you can have up to four of these on one I squared C bus or, like, I think, an infinite number in I3C, which is kind of cool. So the high side is what is preferable. Like, I'll say whatever I do projects like this next one up here. This is an earlier design from a couple years ago. High side's better because you don't have a floating ground, which is one of the issues. If you do low side, then the ground of whatever you're measuring the load of is going to be a little bit higher than your earth ground, which might be OK, but sometimes can make your circuitry a lot more complicated. Also, you run the risk of accidentally shorting the floating ground to the earth ground. And then it says that there's no current going through it and your calculations are all wrong. So high side is the way to go. And it can do up to 60 volts, which is nice, because you can handle basically very large battery packs, solar panels, electric vehicles, et cetera. The current is dependent on the resistor value. I'll show you in a little bit how to calculate that. But basically, easily can do 10 amps. OK, so let's skip ahead. So this is the specifications. The chip itself is powered from about 3.3 volts. But like I said, you can measure up to 60 volts. The total conversion time can also do averaging and filtering over it. So you don't want to just measure necessarily at a point in time. You want to say over 10 milliseconds, give me the average current and the average voltage, because if you have a very spiky signal, you don't want to think that the high point or the low point is representative. So what's really neat is this chip has built-in filtering you can configure. And then the really neat thing about it, compared to other power chips, is that it has I3C support. So what is I3C? It's like I3C is like improved I2C. So like inter-chip communication or whatever. This is improved version. So I3C kind of takes the best of I2C and SPI and combines them. So with I2C, which is in the middle there, you can have multiple sensors all connected to an I2C bus. But then they all have IRQ pins that are separate. Also all the peripherals have to have separate addresses. You can't have address collisions. And they're limited. You can't really go above like 1 megahertz. It's rare to see chips that go above 1 megahertz because they have this pull-up system that slows down the communication. When SPI, on the very right, uses many more pins and you need a chip select for each one. So you still have like extra pins. And you need an extra interrupt pin for each one. But it's much, much higher speed because it doesn't use a pull-up system. It uses a push-pull system. So you can easily get 10 megahertz. Like no problem. 20 megahertz, 24 megahertz is very common. So I3C kind of combines the both. You can go from pull-up to push-pull modes. You can go up to 12 megahertz. Plus there's no separate IRQ lines required. The IRQs are actually handled by the SDA and SCL pins using what's called like interband signaling, which is kind of handled for you transparently. And also, there's dynamic addressing. So you don't have to worry about address collisions. Because on boot, the I3C controller can tell each device, hey, generate yourself a dynamic address that doesn't collide with anybody else's, which is quite nice. If you have one of multiple chips with the same address, that is an issue. I will say not every chip supports I3C. It's pretty new. We talked about it like on an IMPI about a year ago. We're starting to see it more often, but it's still kind of new. That said, it is the future. We're going to see more and more devices and chips support I3C. So you can use this as I2C. But if you have an I3C capable chip or microcontroller or microprocessor, you can enter I3C mode by doing this dynamic address assignment. So it's backwards compatible. But for future use, you know that you have an upgrade path to a faster processor. And this is nice because it's a nice upgrade over the INA series. So the INA, I think the 227 is kind of the closest in voltage and precision to the TSC 1641. But the TSC 1641 is less expensive. Competition is great. Thank you, ST, for making better chips that are cheaper. So we'll make everybody work a little bit harder. And of course, as customers, we benefit. So as I mentioned, you have to calculate and include the shunt resistor. That's the resistor that the current goes through. And there's two things you want to balance. If you have too big of a shunt resistor, you lose precision. But if you have too small of a shunt resistor, you max out how much current you can measure. So you want to get that because the maximum shunt voltage you can measure is like 8 millivolts, I think. So you want to, maybe it's 3 to 2 millivolts. Maybe it's plus or minus 8. Yeah, it's plus or minus 8. So you want to balance between being able to measure the highest amount of current that you're likely to need to measure without maxing out, topping out the internal ADC's range versus you want to have precision at the lower current. So if you get below a couple of milliamps, you still want to have a couple bits of precision. So you can tell the difference between 1 or 5 milliamps. So you choose it as an engineer. They give you the calculation for guidance. But basically a power shunt resistor about 0.10 is probably a good start. There is also an eval board that looks like it's Arduino shield compatible. Also work for the nucleoboard. So easy to get started. It's I squared C. So pretty much every microcontroller board can talk to this chip. And it's in stock. In stock. Right now. Yes. The chip shortage is over. Yeah. And we have a video. We're going to play that and then we'll get right into new products. Does your power supply unit need to be precisely monitored? Do you wish to raise alerts if your battery packs go over or under current, voltage, power, and temperature? The TSC 1641 is our new generation of digital power monitors. It enables safe monitoring thanks to its accurate integrated ADC, its extended voltage range, and its flexible bus interface, the new MiPi 3C bus. Let's jump to our demo of an electrical skateboard. Here we monitor the battery voltage and current under different speeds. We can see the alert when the current goes higher than the limit we have established. So how does it work? The TSC 1641 integrates two 16-bit channels. One is for the current measurement of a shunt resistor with a common mode voltage up to 60 volts. And the other one is for the load measurement up to 60 volts. The power is computed precisely thanks to the fact that they are perfectly synchronized. And die temperature can be measured too. The TSC 1641 uses the new MiPi 3C interface to communicate with the microcontroller and set up the internal registers for configuration, speeds, threshold for the currents, for example. For this demo, we communicate with the new STM32H5. The MiPi 3C interface has a huge advantage in that it can be configured using only two pins, plug and data, communicates at 12.5 megahertz, and implements upper layer commands known as the common command codes. Concerning your industrial application, where you need to monitor the current, voltage, and power to control the power budget of the entire system, in fact, the TSC 1641 is meant to do that in a precise and secure way. For more information, please visit our website, st.com, and read our data brief of the TSC 1641. Thank you.