ABSTRACT
The contemporary world presents novel challenges for distributed measurement and control (DMC) systems. Today’s DMC applications are expected to solve complicated tasks in an autonomous mode, which requires a substantial level of intelligence. Besides the actual on-node intelligent function support, networking for an intelligent sensor requires a universal communication mechanism between the nodes and a uniform means of data representation. The sensors with full-featured digital output convert the measurement results to digital form on-chip. Once converted, digital measurement values can be accessed by the processing device using an appropriate communication interface. The plain sensor interfaces most widely used today do not support any of the features that are required for implementing intelligent sensor functionality. The special smart sensor interfaces, although providing the required functionality, have a rather complicated structure that results in increased price and power consumption for this solution.
