The Universal Signal Conditioning Amplifier

Abstract

A state-of-the-art instrumentation amplifier capable of being used with most types of transducers has recently been developed at the Kennedy Space Center. This Universal Signal Conditioning Amplifier (USCA) can eliminate costly measurement setup time and troubleshooting, improve system reliability, and provide more accurate data than conventional amplifiers. The USCA can configure itself for maximum resolution and accuracy based on information read from a RAM chip attached to each transducer. Excitation voltages or currents are also automatically configured. The amplifier uses both analog and digital state-of-the-art technology with analog-to-digital conversion performed in the early stages to minimize errors introduced by offset and gain drifts in the analog components. A dynamic temperature compensation scheme has been designed to achieve and maintain 12-bit accuracy of the amplifier from 0 to 70E C. The digital signal processing section allows the implementation of digital filters up to 511th order. The amplifier can also perform real-time linearizations up to fourth order while processing data at a rate of 23,438 samples per second (23.438 kS/s). Both digital and analog outputs are available from the amplifier.