First Day Experience in ESC India 2010

Well let me just get into the topic of what i learnt on the first day by attending the ESC seminar rather than telling the colourful details of my experience.
Let me divide this discussion into 2.In the first part i will be explaining as well as providing you with some links about MEMS and its applications where you can get a new feel of todays technology. In the second part i will be talking about the MSP430 microcontroller of Texas Instruments.


1) MEMS are the markers of technical development in the electronic industry. It stands for Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems. If you wish to create a touch sensor or basically a pressure sensor, generally a capacitor sensor would be the traditional idea. In case of the capacitive sensors, one end of the capacitor plate will be generally fixed and the other end will be fixed to the surface where you would wish to measure the pressure, force or even the touch effect. So this plate experiences mechanical force and then moves. So the distance between the capacitor plates changes. Suppose a particular voltage is applied across the capacitor before the displacement could occur, there will be certain voltage V (say). When the plates move, the capacitance of the capacitor will change. This will cause the previously applied voltage across the capacitor to change as well. This change in voltage is then fed to a ADC(Analog to digital convertor) which later when fed to some logical circuit or smart chips like microprocessors or microcontrollers can determine the exact force applied or even the pressure. But the latest MEMS will have these mechanical structures etched out right on the silicon wafers of the chip. So there is no need to arrange a capacitor - ADC setup for getting the converted signals from the sensor. The entire setup can be present in a single chip which can also be designed to even give a processed value of force, pressure etc...
Nowadays, these MEMS devices are used to create accelerometers which measures the acceleration, also a good gyroscope to measure the rotational inertia, motion sensors which can sense motion in 3 dimensions is possible.
For more details refer my books collection page which has 2 books on MEMS. The first one is really good as it mainly focuses on application oriented concepts. I have read it and you can rely on me and start with it if you do wanna start reading some books on MEMS. The second book is on how to develop MEMS. More of physics and material chemistry...Dont curse me if you find it uninteresting.


2) Coming to the MSP430 microcontrollers, it is a low power highly efficient RISC processor core controller from Texas Instruments. It works at really low powers. Works in the input voltage range of 1.8 - 3.6 V. There are many advanced features like it supports JTAG, has a watchdog timer inbuilt, great compatibility....
Texas Instruments has a great product support for this product. Kindly visit this link for more and authoritative information
www.ti.com/msp430