Design of an electronic assembly for the precise conversion of analog sine/cosine signals for reference measurements of position sensors

Abstract

[eng] Position sensor technology has become a crucial field of automation industry. Every automatic movement needs a position acknowledgement: from the movement of a robotic arm to the twist of a steering wheel in an automatic card. Often is also required that the position measurement is as accurate as possible, e.g. in medicine as well as in automation industry fields. iC-Haus GmbH is a German company whose production is mainly focused on position encoding solutions. They are specialist in a type of analog-to-digital conversion called Sine-to-digital. This type of conversion is need when a position value codified on a Sine/Cosine wave is to be digitized. Their products offer Sine-todigital conversion to different digital formats. The products are also tested in the company. That’s why the need of a reference system is born, in order to compare the produced devices with a high-accuracy reference value. The objective of this project is designing an electronic assembly which is able to convert a given high-accuracy reference position in two digital formats and compare its output with the output of a device from iC-Haus and quantify its error. To this end, the concept and the requirements of the system have been planned, and afterwards a printed circuit board has been designed, manufactured and measured. All the external components to operate the board have been also designed. When all the board functions are measured, a comparison between the digital output of the designed system and a device under test from iC-Haus is performed. The whole project has been developed in the Applications and Sales department of the offices of iC-Haus GmbH in Bodenheim, Germany.