Single-chip solution simplifies industrial and home automation applications seeking to reduce board space and optimise energy efficiency
“Our newest power monitoring chip is a gamechanger for IoT devices, smart lighting, data centers, and telecom applications, in particular,” says Shaun Milano, Business Unit Director for Current Sensors at Allegro. “We’ve improved on our first-generation integrated solution by adding the ability to measure voltage, current and power in AC as well as DC at the same time – and with reinforced isolation, our customers can eliminate many expensive components on their PCBs. The ACS37800 dramatically simplifies measuring power in a unique single-chip solution.”
The new ACS37800 allows devices to easily track power consumption and to optimise energy use by detecting reduced power efficiency for predictive maintenance. This makes the ACS37800 ideal for motor control, building automation, and a variety of green industrial applications.
Extensive integration and power triangle calculations simplify BOM and shrink time to market
Offered in an efficient SOIC16 footprint, the ACS37800 further reduces PCB size and significantly reduces bill of materials (BOM) cost and complexity by eliminating the need for many components that competitive solutions require in similar conditions. For example, the integrated 517 Vrms reinforced isolation enables current sensing without expensive opto-isolators, Rogowski coils, oversized current transformers, isolated operational amplifiers, or shunt resistors.
Thanks to its onboard regulator, the ACS37800 can be powered from the same voltage supply as the system microprocessor (5 V or 3.3 V).
The ACS37800 simplifies common power triangle measurements by calculating parameters such as the active, reactive, and apparent power as well as instantaneous and RMS values of the current, voltage, or power. Furthermore, the ACS37800 is able to average these parameters with many instantaneous measurements over a one minute period, avoiding inaccuracies when waveforms are asymmetric. These features reduce the reliance on microcontroller unit (MCU) resources for critical calculations.
